Abbas Fighting Rivals in Clash on Peace Talks

Abbas Fighting Rivals in Clash on Peace Talks
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/middleeast/09MIDE.html

JERUSALEM, July 8 — Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, battled rival Palestinian leaders today to retain control of negotiations with Israel over a new American-backed peace plan, threatening to quit to face down a storm of criticism that he had gained little for renouncing violence.

Mr. Abbas abruptly canceled a meeting planned for Wednesday with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and some Palestinian officials said he might now harden his negotiating stance toward Israel.

Mr. Abbas's allies said he was unlikely to follow through on his threat of resignation, which he has made in previous internal political fights. But he did step down today from the top governing body of Fatah, the faction he helped found with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

In Washington today, the Bush administration prepared to provide funds to the Palestinian Authority for the first time, in an effort to help Mr. Abbas. [Page A6.]

In a setback to the peace plan, known as the road map, the militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility today for a bombing that killed a 65-year-old Israeli woman in her home on Monday night. The bombing, the work of a terrorist whose body was found at the scene, was the first such attack since the main Palestinian factions, including Islamic Jihad, announced on June 29 that they were suspending violence.

The stated reasons for the renewed killing and Palestinian political turmoil were the same: Palestinian anger that Israel had not agreed to release more of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in its custody.

But Mr. Abbas was facing a broader challenge to his leadership, directed in part by Mr. Arafat, who reluctantly appointed him this spring under American and Israeli pressure, according to Palestinian and Western officials.

In meetings late into Monday night in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Mr. Abbas came under sharp attack from senior members of Fatah who are allied with Mr. Arafat, and from members of other factions. They said he had failed so far to extract significant concessions from Israel, Palestinian officials said. A central issue was the matter of prisoners, but the criticism covered his entire negotiating approach, which officials said was too indulgent of Israeli and American demands.

In response to the criticism, Mr. Abbas resigned today from the Central Committee, the top governing body of Fatah, and threatened to quit as prime minister.

One diplomat who was following the fight closely described Mr. Abbas as being "in a very tough-minded mood" and "tired of being pushed around."

Seen in that light, his threat to resign, made to Mr. Arafat, may have been a bluff to protect his authority. If Mr. Abbas left, his departure might cost the rest of the Palestinian leadership the new legitimacy Mr. Abbas has gained internationally, and particularly in Washington, through his pursuit of a cease-fire and the peace plan.

A member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's top body, the executive committee, which also grilled Mr. Abbas on Monday night, said he now expected sharp disagreement with Israel. "Things are leading toward a crisis" with Israel, he said.

Israel is not obligated by the peace plan to release any prisoners, a move that is as noxious to Israelis as it is appealing to Palestinians. Yet in what Israel called an effort to support Mr. Abbas, it has begun releasing some prisoners, and on Sunday the government said it would free about 300 more, of more than 5,500 it is believed to hold.

But Israel said that it would give preference to people under 18 and over 60, and that it would release no one implicated in violence or connected to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Beyond the question of prisoners, some Palestinian officials accused Mr. Abbas of letting Israel dictate how the peace plan is put into action. They said he had allowed Israel to marginalize the three other members of the so-called quartet that drew up the plan with the Bush administration — the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

Some officials also criticized Mr. Abbas for failing to push for a speedier Israeli withdrawal from areas of the West Bank that, according to the Oslo agreement, are supposed to be under Palestinian control.

In a sign of Israeli concern that Mr. Abbas's position was precarious, Mr. Sharon's government did not criticize his decision to cancel the Wednesday meeting. One Israeli official said the government viewed the cancellation as a move against other Palestinian leaders, not against Israel.

Mr. Abbas's abrupt cancellation of the meeting — in the wake of Palestinian, not Israeli, violence — came in marked contrast to his genial appearance in public last Tuesday with Mr. Sharon, before their last meeting. Some Palestinian officials said Mr. Abbas got too far out in front of his own people with that appearance, in which he declared that Palestinians would pursue their dispute with Israel by "diplomatic means."

The Israeli reaction to the bombing on Monday night was also muted. The attack occurred in an Israeli village, Kfar Yavetz, near the boundary of the northern West Bank, where Israeli forces have not ceded security control.

Gil Kleiman, a police spokesman, said that the police were treating the bombing as a "probable suicide attack," but that it was unusual because it took place inside a home. The explosion killed the bomber and Mazal Afari, 65, the mother of eight. It also injured three of Mrs. Afari's grandchildren.

While warning that a suicide bombing that killed more people would end the peace effort, Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister, told Israeli Army radio that this bombing was "not a huge attack" and said, "We have an opportunity now that we must not miss."

Islamic Jihad identified the bomber as a 22-year-old from the northern West Bank and claimed responsibility in a fax to The Associated Press. The fax warned, "Release the prisoners or the consequences will be grave."

For a Town Council in Iraq, Many Queries, Few Answers

For a Town Council in Iraq, Many Queries, Few Answers
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/worldspecial/09COUN.html

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq, July 5 — On a recent morning, the Abu Ghraib town council was hearing the usual litany of complaints, offering its usual mix of help and, mostly, impotence in return. Overhead, a fan turned, but the air did not.

The constituents' woes came down to the essentials. They had no power, and thus no clean water — could they get generators? They had no security — could they get weapons permits?

If anyone could help them, it should have been the man at the center of the scene, Dari Hamis al-Dari. In April, he was selected by the local tribes to lead Iraq's first freely formed town council after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Since then, he has sat at a desk in a white robe and headdress, in a room lined with men in tribal robes and Western dress all looking to him for answers. He has not had many.

Mr. Dari could do nothing for the man who, lacking electricity, stayed up all night fanning a sick child, nothing for the 5-year-old child who was left legless by unexploded ordnance that detonated, a sight that caused him to weep. He could do nothing for the multitudes complaining of cars, weapons or relatives taken by American forces, other than give their names to the Americans. He could do nothing for those lacking drinking water or waiting for food rations.

"What do you tell the people — have more patience?" he asked rhetorically. "Till when?"

If America has natural allies in Iraq, they are men like Mr. Dari. He attended the American Jesuit school in Baghdad, then university in Frankfurt. He has lived in Europe and speaks excellent English. He maintained his independence throughout Mr. Hussein's rule, shunning the material blandishments with which Mr. Hussein bought the loyalty of many tribal sheiks.

A part-time farmer and businessman, he is a member of the sizable Zobaa tribe, which his brother leads. He welcomed the Americans and has worked closely with their military commanders in his area.

So the impatience creeping into his voice and the frustration lining his handsome face bode poorly for the fate of the American-led occupation here — even if American officials succeed in drawing Iraqis into a new national leadership. There is no indication that Mr. Dari, who is 64, would turn on the Americans. He is simply losing faith in them.

"Conditions have never been worse," he said bluntly. "We've never been through such a long bad period."

Abu Ghraib — a largely agricultural area just west of Baghdad that is also home to Iraq's most notorious prison — has had only one to three hours of power a day in recent weeks. Drinking water cannot be pumped without electricity, so people take water from dirty canals.

The food ration system that functioned smoothly under Saddam Hussein is breaking down, out here at least. Trucks leave Baghdad laden with food, but it mysteriously gets offloaded at markets along the way.

Crime, rare under the old government, is rampant. Mr. Dari's car was taken from him at gunpoint in Baghdad recently. Four of his council members have been the victims of carjacking attempts. And while the criminals are well-armed, the Americans are disarming the victims, taking weapons while the weapons licenses they insist on are in short supply.

"People here feel naked without their pistols," Mr. Dari said, putting his own in a holster.

In a time of rising discontent, Mr. Dari is the buffer between occupier and occupied. It is a role that, historically, has earned little appreciation. Recent attacks on Iraqis cooperating with the Americans suggest that this chapter will be no different.

"We are stuck between the Americans and our people," Mr. Dari said of the council, which sits, for no salary, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. "And there were so many promises from one side."

Some people are calling the council members "America lovers" and traitors, he said, because they are working with the Americans.

"He's caught in the middle," one of his American partners, Lt. Col. Jeff Ingram of the First Armored Division, acknowledged. "He defends us a lot."

These days, Mr. Dari is warning the Americans more than he is defending them. When he first met with them, he said, he told them that they did not have much time to meet people's expectations. That time is almost up, he believes.

"I'm not threatening you with another Vietnam — God forbid," he said. "I'm just trying to get help for the people before something happens."

Something is already happening, of course. Out here, as across much of Iraq, the attacks on Americans are stepping up. Colonel Ingram said his company is being attacked at least once a day, fortunately by men who are not very good shots.

Colonel Ingram blames the Iraqis for most of the area's problems, saying it is they who have torn down the power lines he fixed, they who are robbing one another. "The U.S. is not the problem, it's the solution," he said.

But he too wonders about the slow pace of rebuilding. "I would have expected the U.S., the biggest country in the world, to say here's the water purification system, here's the big generator," he said.

As of the other day, neither Mr. Dari nor Colonel Ingram had ever had any contact with the American-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Mr. Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.

So they soldier on alone, often seeking progress in vain. The council tried to distribute generators found at a Republican Guard camp to villages, but found that many of the village "representatives" were driving out of the camp and selling the generators. Others were being set upon by angry mobs wanting the generators for themselves.

American soldiers were deployed to keep order, but in the heat and chaos their tempers frayed. They broke windshields and cursed at Iraqis, further shrinking the reservoir of good will.

Mr. Dari said he received 10 to 12 complaints a day about weapons, cars or relatives taken by the Americans. One man came to report that American soldiers had taken away his deaf relative a month ago for having a picture of Saddam Hussein in his house, and that he had not been seen since. Officials from an Islamic charity said the Americans had confiscated their car and raided their office — then left both unsecured, giving looters free rein.

Then there are the small problems. The woman who is illegally squatting in a government building (American soldiers told Mr. Dari they could not evict her unless she threatened someone; property rights were not in their "purview.") The two council members whom the council dismissed for corruption. The effort to find the American commander with the authority to sign a contract for garbage collection.

Mr. Dari is just old enough to remember when the British had an air base just west of here. They told Iraqis they had come to liberate them from the Ottomans, he recalled, and they stayed 40 years.

"I hope history isn't repeating itself," he said, and pressed his temples as if hoping to make the impatient men at both elbows disappear.

In the Face of Death

In the Face of Death
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/06MITIGATION.html

At 2:40 a.m. on Aug. 26, 1998, along a main drag on the west side of Indianapolis, 18-year-old Jeremy Gross approached a convenience store with a friend. They intended to rob it. At 5-foot-8 and of slender build, Gross was not particularly physically imposing, and he had a distant look about him. He wore his blond hair in a bowl cut and often seemed nervous and fidgety. He knew the store well, since he worked there part time, and he also knew the young man, Christopher Beers, who was the lone clerk that morning. Beers, who was 24, had been raised by his father and had completed one year at Purdue University before running out of money for tuition. He was overweight and, according to his uncle, mild-mannered. He was working to earn money to return to school. An avid reader, he welcomed the graveyard shift; it gave him time with his books.

Gross stood outside the glass doors, behind his accomplice, Joshua Spears. He held a small, black semiautomatic pistol at his side, out of sight. Gross was jumpy, turning his head from side to side to make sure no one was in the parking lot. Beers buzzed them in. Gross took long, hurried strides into the store, raised his right arm and started shooting. It happened so quickly that Beers didn't have a chance to say anything. The first shot hit him in the abdomen. Gross continued to fire. Three shots missed, but a fourth hit Beers in the chest. ''Oh, God, please, no,'' he pleaded. As Beers stumbled into the back office, Gross followed and, to get a better angle, shifted the pistol from his right hand to his left. From close range, Gross shot Beers in the face. With blood now gushing from his eyes, Beers reached out for Gross, as if he were asking for support. Gross pushed him away, and he crumpled to the floor. ''Why, Jeremy, why?'' Beers asked. Gross told him to shut up.

Gross's partner, Spears, had headed for another room to get the surveillance tape, but he couldn't get the eject to function, so he grabbed the VCR. Meanwhile, Gross emptied the cash register and office safe of $650, then ripped the two telephone cords from the wall. This all happened in less than a minute. The two fled by foot, through a neighborhood of mobile homes to their trailer park not more than half a mile away. Along the way, Gross and Spears threw the gun and the VCR over a wire fence into a retaining pond.

After they left, Beers lifted himself off the floor and shuffled out the door to a pay phone, where he again collapsed. He died under a dangling phone, rivulets of blood running from his head.

A passer-by who was a regular customer at the Convenient Food Mart had seen Gross and Spears enter the store. He gave the police a description, and another employee said that the description sounded like that of Gross. Less than seven hours later, Gross confessed to detectives, steering them to the VCR and gun. They found the VCR lying in shallow water, protruding from the mud; divers recovered the gun.

F.B.I. experts salvaged the videotape of the murder, and a few weeks later, after viewing the terror of that night, Scott Newman, then the Marion County prosecutor, told a reporter for The Indianapolis Star, ''There isn't a jury in this world . . . that would not recommend the ultimate penalty in this case, the death penalty.''

On the 24-page jury questionnaire, Elizabeth Stone, who is 60 and works as a nurse, wrote that she ''strongly favored'' the death penalty. ''I looked at it as an eye for an eye,'' she told me when I recently spoke with her. ''Someone who takes someone's life deserves death.'' Another juror, 54-year-old Cheryl Berkowitz (then Cheryl Rader), who works at a drug-treatment center, said during the voir dire that she thought the death penalty was not used often enough. These two, along with nine other women and a man, were chosen to serve on the jury that would decide the case of the State of Indiana v. Jeremy Gross.

Like most juries, this one was composed of a diverse group. There was a manager of a McDonald's, a cook at a child-care center and a machine operator at a foundry. On the questionnaires where it asked, ''Whom do you most admire?'' one wrote ''Ronald Reagan,'' another ''John F. Kennedy,'' another ''Princess Diana'' and still another ''Montel Williams.'' But they all shared one thing in common. Each of them told the court that yes, they could vote to end someone's life. This is a requirement to sit on a capital murder case, and it is, in some measure, what attracted me to Jeremy Gross's case. That, and the fact that in what most likely is the only opportunity they would ever get, these 12 jurors, all of whom swore their allegiance to the death penalty, in the end, balked.

The trial took place in the spring of 2000, two years after the shooting, though I learned about it only recently as I began making inquiries around the country in an effort to understand what would sway 12 jurors who believe in capital punishment to spare a life. Whether someone lives or dies is the ultimate of Solomonic decisions, and 33 of 38 death-penalty states entrust it to a jury rather than to a judge. What happens when 12 people who support the death penalty face it up close?

Over the past few years, detective work and advances in DNA technology have uncovered a frighteningly high number of wrongfully convicted, especially on death row. But there may be another, albeit quieter, revolution taking place, out of view, in jury rooms. The number of death sentences handed down has dropped precipitously, from a modern-day peak of 319 in 1996 to 229 in 2000, and then to 155 in 2001. And a study released just last month reported that in 15 of the last 16 federal capital trials, jurors chose life sentences over death.

There are a number of factors at work here. In early 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, staggered by the number of wrongful convictions in his state, declared a moratorium on executions. It received a good deal of national press and undoubtedly made some prosecutors and jurors more cautious. (Last January, Ryan went beyond a moratorium; he pardoned four inmates and commuted the sentences of the other 167 on Illinois's death row.) Additionally, the murder rate has been in a steady decline, though that has been going on for some time.

There are two factors, however, that more than anything else may help explain the decline in death-penalty sentences. One is the increasing availability of life without parole as an option, which all but three death-penalty states now offer. In polls, three-fourths of Americans say they believe in the death penalty. But when asked whether they'd support capital punishment if life without parole was an option, the number is reduced to half.

The other contributor, perhaps tougher to measure, is a development over the last decade: an increasing number of defense attorneys have become more skilled and resourceful in persuading jurors that the lives of their clients are worth saving.

The proceedings in a capital trial are unlike any other. They are divided into two distinct phases. In the first phase, a jury, as in any other criminal case, decides guilt or innocence. Then, if they've reached a guilty verdict, the trial enters what's called the penalty phase, in which the same jurors hear what is called mitigating evidence -- testimony about the defendant's character, about his childhood, about his past deeds, good and bad. It is, in essence, a plea for mercy, an unapologetic and sometimes mawkish effort to win sympathy for someone who has killed another human being. Because of what's at stake, the Supreme Court has ruled that capital cases must be highly individualized affairs, so it has opened the door to just about anything that will help jurors get to know and understand the defendant.

The notion that a jury in a capital case has to determine not only legal culpability but also moral blameworthiness has always struck me as a remarkable measure of our unresolved attitudes toward capital punishment. ''It's a tremendous moral moment,'' Austin Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College, says of the penalty phase. ''It's where the rubber meets the road.''

I settled on the State of Indiana v. Jeremy Gross because I'd been looking for a case in which guilt was not in doubt and in which substantial mitigation was presented. I also sought out a case that occurred a few years ago in the hope that the lapse of time might make the jurors more likely to speak about their personal journeys through the trial. In the end, I tracked down nine of the jurors; only one of them declined to speak with me.

These jurors -- each of whom, remember, believed in capital punishment -- looked death in the face and walked away. Newman, the prosecutor at the time of the trial, has suggested that jurors in instances like this get ''weak in the knees.'' Is it that simple?

The murder received a large amount of press locally, including television interviews with Gross shortly after his arrest. Daily coverage of the proceedings was anticipated. A decision was made to sequester the jurors, who were put up at the Indianapolis Athletic Club, an 80-year-old stone structure near the courthouse. They were told to pack enough clothes and books for two weeks. One juror brought an armful of crossword-puzzle books. Another brought a pile of family photographs, planning to make a scrapbook. Still another brought along her Bible as well as a book titled ''Tough Questions, Biblical Answers,'' given to her by her minister shortly before the trial. They could not call family or friends, though they could write letters and receive visitors each Sunday. They were not allowed to visit one another's rooms or watch television. They couldn't venture anywhere -- take a walk, visit the exercise room -- without being accompanied by a bailiff. It was, many of the jurors told me, one of the most difficult aspects of the trial: having to face alone the weightiest decision of their lives.

Courtroom No. 4 is modest in size. The jurors sat along one wall, slightly elevated, in low-back swivel chairs. The witness stand and the spectators' gallery, which seats 50 and was nearly filled every day, mostly with families and friends of the victim and Gross, were within a few feet of the jury box. A number of the jurors complained of feeling cramped. At one point, a couple of them asked if some of Beers's relatives could be moved to another part of the gallery; they could feel the presence of the men in the first row.

Jeffrey Gill, a 38-year-old deputy prosecutor who had never before tried a death-penalty case, gave the opening statement. He laid out the crime and told the jury about the existence of the videotape. It was a presentation marked by its spareness. The facts in the case were chilling and indisputable.

Then Bob Hill, a 47-year-old defense attorney who had previously represented 14 men facing capital punishment, just flat out conceded to the jury that he had no case. Hill, who has a folksy manner, told the jurors that the prosecution ''has plenty of evidence to convict Jeremy Gross. I would be an idiot if I said otherwise.'' But, he went on, ''we have substantial evidence to preserve his life.'' Hill then played for them the videotape of Gross walking into the Convenient Food Mart and shooting Beers three times. It was a gamble, but he knew the tape would be presented at some point and he thought it best if he did it right up front. ''It was the most damning piece of evidence, and we couldn't make it go away,'' he told me recently. ''I made it clear that it was Jeremy who pulled the trigger, and here's the videotape to show that. I told them there's no excuse for what Jeremy did, but I can explain how he gets to that convenience store.''

The jurors watched the video on a large television screen. They were, to a person, horrified, though most found it confusing -- at least at this first viewing, since four camera angles play out simultaneously, and it all happens in a mere 41 seconds. In the tape, Beers, dressed in a sweatshirt and shorts, seems baffled by Gross's single-minded effort to kill him. Some jurors weren't fully able to make sense of the scene until the very end, when Gross walks into the anteroom and shoots Beers in the head. In the final moments, Beers can be seen reaching out to Gross for support. The jurors were riveted. Gross turned his head. ''You're talking about a coldhearted act,'' Hill told the jurors, ''but you're not talking about a cold heart.''

In those early days of the trial, the jurors avoided making eye contact with Gross, who at Hill's instructions was cleanshaven and well dressed in a polo shirt, dress slacks and loafers. It was impossible, though, for the jurors not to take notice of him. Some were struck by how young he looked. Indeed, Gross, who had had a buzz cut in jail, had let his hair grow at Hill's request so he'd look more youthful. Gross had also put on nearly 50 pounds since he'd been arrested, so his face appeared pudgy, softening his already boyish features. Others were struck by his lack of affect. One juror thought he looked so disconnected that it was as if he were on trial for shoplifting. In fact, Gross was so nervous that his legs twitched, and he often sat gripping the defense table, looking into space, which he later told me was the one way he could stop his involuntary leg movements.

The jurors were shaken by the video, and during a 20-minute break sat in the jury room in complete silence. ''It seemed coldblooded and malicious and premeditated,'' recalled one juror. ''I think everyone was just stunned.'' In the guilt phase of the trial, which lasted two days, the jurors saw the videotape once again, this time with the audio, as well as photographs from the crime scene, including the snapshot of a bloody Beers lying by the dangling pay phone. They also heard the prosecution make a convincing argument that Gross planned the robbery and went to the Convenient Food Mart intending to kill Beers. And the prosecution played for the jurors Gross's confession to detectives, in which he told them: ''He knew it was me. . . . I just couldn't stop. My fingers just kept going.''

Hill did little to counter the evidence but instead began to offer snippets of Gross's childhood. He also suggested that Gross had smoked marijuana before the robbery and murder, which might provide reason to not convict him of intentional murder.

Toward the end of the guilt phase, a juror told the judge about an unnerving incident in the jury room. One juror, playing a game of hangman, drew a gallows on the blackboard and what appeared to be an electric chair. Hill considered asking the judge to excuse the juror but in the end chose not to because he had misgivings about the alternates. But, he said: ''That scared me to death. I didn't know if that was a message, or if she was preparing herself for it.''

The deliberations took five and a half hours, longer than anyone had anticipated. One juror, Cheryl Berkowitz, who in the voir dire told the lawyers that she believed the death penalty wasn't imposed often enough, had come to believe that Gross must have been high when he committed the murder and so hadn't been in his right mind. But it went deeper than that. Berkowitz had also come to identify with him. She was a recovering cocaine addict and alcoholic. Berkowitz, a soft-featured woman who often looks as if she has a lot on her mind, spent her nights during the trial reading recovery literature. She knew firsthand what drugs could do to one's mental state. ''There was a time I thought about robbing a convenience store so I could get thrown in jail and get off of drugs,'' she told me. She had even once shot at her husband and missed. More than anything, though, Berkowitz was struck by how young Gross looked. ''That was everything,'' she said. ''It was hard to put the two together, this young kid sitting there -- he looked scared -- and this videotape. I have a son, too. He was 23 at the time. I looked at Jeremy and thought, What the hell happened? Why would you be out robbing someone? He was just a kid to me.''

Eventually, though, Berkowitz conceded that there was no doubt that Gross was guilty of murder while committing an armed robbery. Most of the other jurors at that point shared none of Berkowitz's reservations. They thought Gross deserved to die. Kevin Garrison, a 51-year-old father of two who had just retired from his job as an engineer at the phone company, remembers thinking to himself: ''This is pretty easy. This won't take long. Guilty. And death.'' Garrison, a physically fit, white-haired Reagan Republican, was chosen jury foreman, mostly because of his no-nonsense attitude and even-keeled nature. He told me that at that point in the trial, ''I thought the death penalty was not only appropriate but was paramount.'' Another juror, Carrie Tuterow, said, ''I had made up my mind: for justice to be imposed, he needed to die.''

In fact, many of the jurors figured the trial was over. ''I don't think any of us had a clue there was more coming,'' Garrison told me.

As one lawyer recently put it to me, the penalty phase of a death-penalty trial is where ''the law runs out.'' For prosecutors, it's a fairly straight-ahead process. They try to prove what are called aggravators, acts that make a murder more heinous. The most common -- applicable in Gross's case -- is murder committed intentionally during a felony, most usually a robbery. But aggravators can also include the killing of children, murder that involves torture and the murder of a police officer.

The defense, on the other hand, has latitude to present virtually anything that might reflect on the character of the defendant or the crime. This is where the trial becomes wide open and freewheeling. Mitigation presentations can come across as sentimental affairs, often with complex and heartbreaking family sagas, a cross between a Bob Greene column and a Tolstoy novel.

Jurors are asked to weigh the aggravators against the mitigators and decide which, in the end, tip the scale. ''It's a crap shoot,'' one defense attorney told me. Except here's the telling part: roughly half of all death-penalty juries don't vote for death. And in those cases in which juries do vote for it, it's unclear how often the defense lawyers did a lousy job of telling their clients' stories. It's not to say that even with the most compelling mitigation, jurors won't impose the death penalty, especially in states like Texas where life without parole is not an option. But as one lawyer said to me, without mitigation, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Putting together extensive, sophisticated mitigation is relatively new to most capital-defense attorneys. There was a time, a decade ago, when lawyers would frequently choose not to present any mitigating circumstances out of fear that their clients might be perceived as bad seeds, thus making it easier for the jury to vote for death. Or often defense lawyers put all their time into trying to prove their clients' innocence, collecting nothing about their clients' pasts. It still happens.

But defense lawyers are getting savvier. For one, they're increasingly relying on ''mitigation specialists,'' a burgeoning new profession whose numbers have more than tripled in the past 10 years. They're often trained as social workers and then learn the tools of a private investigator. Their job is not unlike that of a journalist's, the collection and writing of an individual's story. This past February, the American Bar Association added to its guidelines for capital-defense attorneys a section that encouraged them to work closely with mitigation specialists.

In 1990, a group of researchers set out to determine whether the penalty phase was working as it should. In interviews with 1,200 capital jurors over the past 13 years, the Capital Jury Project, which is financed by the National Science Foundation, has found that the most important factor in leading a jury to spare someone's life is lingering doubt (which is one of the few things that can't be addressed in the penalty phase). But jurors made it clear that they were influenced by other factors as well -- if the defendant had been placed in institutions but was never given help; or was under 18; or was abused as a child; or had no prior criminal record. (Preliminary findings from the study also show, somewhat surprisingly, that women are just as likely as men to impose death.)

Some of its findings, though, have been ambiguous or incomplete. Recently, the project has reported that roughly a third of jurors have decided on death before the penalty phase even begins. But they are only now beginning to analyze how quality mitigation affects decisions. The initial research, says Marla Sandys, one of the project's founders, indicates that ''where jurors acknowledge the existence of mitigation, they're more likely to change their mind and they're more likely than not to go for life.'' Ten days ago, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional duty of defense attorneys in capital cases to fully investigate their clients' social histories, because, as the court suggested, to do otherwise would deny a jury the information it needs to decide whether the defendant's life should be preserved.

By the time Bob Hill got Gross's case, he knew it was senseless to spend time trying to gather evidence for an acquittal. So for a year and a half, Hill, along with his co-counsel, Mark Earnest, searched for people who in one manner or another had touched Gross's life. Persuading some of them to testify was tough. This was especially true of Gross's parents, who would essentially have to tell the jury how irresponsible they'd been. It took nearly a dozen visits with Gross's mother before she agreed to lay out her dismal life in court. ''I'm a little bit social worker, a little bit psychologist, a little bit friend and a little bit lawyer,'' Hill said. He might have added storyteller to that list, for in the end that's what makes for the best mitigation: a compelling, believable yarn that, as Hill told me, tries ''to make sense out of the nonsensical.'' It's an art that has little to do with good lawyering. ''You don't engage in the in-your-face kind of lawyering you usually do,'' he said. ''I wanted to get the jury to walk in Jeremy's shoes.''

To assist them, they hired Cheri Hodson-Guevara, who had worked with recovering alcoholics before becoming a mitigation specialist. Over the course of a year, Hodson-Guevara helped the attorneys find witnesses and worked to gain those witnesses' trust. ''You're asking them to tell you things they've never told anyone else before,'' she told me. ''I'm out there to ask the question 'Why?' There's always a 'why.'''

The penalty phase in Gross's trial spanned five days. None of the jurors spoke to me of a single moment of epiphany; rather they described a gradual, cumulative understanding of why Jeremy Gross entered the Convenient Food Mart and murdered Christopher Beers.

Forty-one people testified, including Jeremy's mother. One juror recalls that she never once looked at her son. ''It was almost as if she were talking about a complete stranger,'' another juror told me. But it wasn't only family members who took the stand. The mother of a former girlfriend of Gross's. Friends of Gross's. One of the state's most renowned high-school football coaches. Three psychologists. A former state Supreme Court justice. Three caseworkers for child welfare. And foster parents who had taken Jeremy and his sister in for a year.

Many of the jurors cried during testimony. Many had restless nights. ''It's 4:18 a.m.,'' one juror wrote to her husband. ''Can't sleep anymore.'' One juror recalled that she had one overriding emotion through those days: ''I was scared,'' she said.

Gross's first 18 years were indeed full of misery and suffering. But is that reason to spare someone's life? After all, as the prosecution would point out, not everyone who has a wretched childhood kills. And besides, as the prosecutor Jeffrey Gill pointed out, ''Everybody who commits murder comes with a story.''

This is what the jury heard the first day. By the time Gross was born, his parents, who were quite young, didn't get along. When his father drank, which was often, he would get violent. One of Jeremy's first memories, from age 6, was of his father slamming his mother's head into the refrigerator. Photographs taken at the time were passed out to the jury. One showed her with a welt on her neck and a blackened and bloodied eye. Another displayed the stitched-up gash on top of her scalp. That same year, Gross's father, Jeff, and his mother, Cindy, both exceedingly drunk after a day spent watching the Indianapolis 500 on television and then bar-hopping, got into another dispute. His father smacked his mother across the face, then a short while later fell asleep on the living-room couch. Cindy doused the sofa with charcoal-lighter fluid, lighted a match and then took her daughter, Jennifer, by the hand, lifted her son, Jeremy, into her arms and walked out the door. Gross's father escaped unscathed, but Cindy, in this same courtroom, was found guilty of arson and placed on probation.

She and her husband separated, and she took Jennifer and Jeremy to live with her at a friend's house, where, among the chaos, a prostitute named Angel had sex with men in the living room. Cindy disappeared for days at a time, frequently consuming vast quantities of alcohol and prescription drugs. Dog feces littered the floors. Jeremy occasionally slept in a closet. He had so few clothes that in two photographs Hill showed the jury, he was wearing the same turquoise-colored shirt. The pictures had been taken more than a year apart. Kids at school would taunt him with the moniker ''gross Jeremy,'' and teachers would send home notes complaining of his dress and hygiene.

Bob Hill unveiled two charts. In mitigation circles, they're called ''chaos maps.'' One listed the 27 addresses where Jeremy had lived by the time he was 16; the other, the 33 schools he had attended. When Jeremy was 8 and his sister was 10, the state child-welfare services took them away from Cindy. ''They didn't have a place in this world,'' a friend of Cindy's testified.

Almost all of the jurors were parents, and they couldn't understand how a mother could be so uncaring for her children. One juror, Sandra Logan, tried to avoid looking at Gross for fear she would weep in the courtroom. When she did catch glimpses of him, his head was often buried in his hands, or his head was lowered as he doodled on a legal pad. (He was writing notes to himself like ''be calm'' or ''it's O.K.'')

Jurors began to view what they initially thought was indifference as shame. Logan, whose face is lined with wrinkles from working for 26 years with hot oil as a machine operator, is by her own admission occasionally aloof and gruff, and she didn't interact much with the other jurors. Logan has two sons, one of whom served two years in prison for stealing money from his employer. Looking at Gross, she told me, ''I did think, 'Yeah, that could've been my son.'''

Early on in Jeremy's mother's testimony, when she recounted her efforts to set her husband afire, Logan recognized the address. It was down the street from where she lived. She remembered the fire but hadn't known the details. The house is still boarded up. ''It upset me more than the murder,'' she said. ''I guess because I couldn't understand how a mother or father could do their child the way they had done him. I felt his parents were more to blame than he was.''

A number of the other jurors had begun to feel the same. Cheryl Berkowitz thought of what she had done to her own son who had taken care of her when she was hiding out in her bedroom, sometimes for weeks at a time, using cocaine. ''Having to take care of your drug-addicted mother,'' she said, ''that's a burden no kid should have.'' But what ate at her even more is that she became convinced that Gross's mother knew what he was doing, especially because it became clear that she once threatened to turn her son in to the police if he didn't give her a portion of money he'd stolen. On another occasion, she helped him hide a stolen truck. ''Where's her responsibility in all of this?'' Berkowitz asked herself.

In fact, early in the trial, Hill suggested to the jurors that there should be two other seats at the defense table, inferring that Gross's mother and father were also to blame. Kevin Garrison, the foreman, came to agree. ''They might as well have pulled the trigger,'' he thought. ''They just didn't care.''

Sandra Logan couldn't concentrate at night. She was unable to complete her crossword puzzles. Without anyone to talk to about what she was hearing all day, she occasionally wrote notes to herself before she fell asleep. The first time was after they had found Gross guilty. ''The tug of war in my gut, it's going to stay with me for some time to come,'' she wrote. ''Jeremy is such a young man to have destroyed his life and will haunt me forever. I'm sure the day will come that I will be calling on God's strength to guide me.'' Shortly after Gross's parents testified, she wrote: ''Even life in prison seems awfully harsh for Jeremy. He's been doing a life sentence since he was born.''

The thinking goes in mitigation circles that it's not enough to present someone as psychically battered and frayed, since if a jury feels he's too far gone, what's left to save? As Hill put it to me, he worried they might just say, ''Throw it away; it's broke.'' But when he found Charles and Gail Garner, who for one year had been foster parents to Jeremy and his sister, Hill began to think he had a chance of persuading the jury that ''there's something here worth saving.''

The Garners live on the outskirts of Indianapolis in a modest ranch house. Charles, or Buck, as he's usually called, is a big man, with arms and neck thick as an oak. Gail has layered, shoulder-length brown hair and seems as sturdy as her husband. Buck wore blue jeans and his trademark black cowboy boots when he came to court to testify; Gail wore jeans and tennis shoes. ''We wasn't no big tycoons,'' he told me. When Buck took the stand, he glanced over at Jeremy, whom he hadn't seen in a dozen years. ''I was still trying to imagine that 8-year-old boy I'd last seen,'' he said. ''That little boy wasn't there anymore.'' Buck and Gail, who were both in their late 20's in 1988 and had been married seven years, had tried without success to have kids. So they decided to become foster parents. The first and last children they took in were Jeremy and Jennifer.

Buck and Gail testified that they enrolled Jeremy and Jennifer in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, that they gave them chores every day, that they made a point of sitting down as a family every night for dinner to talk about the day. Jeremy did well at school and played Little League baseball. ''I was very proud of him,'' Buck told the jurors, ''as if he was my own son.''

Buck described how, when their mother was scheduled to come get them for the night, he would dress the children in sweatpants so that if she didn't show -- which was usually the case -- they could fall asleep on the living-room couch. He recounted the time at a Little League game when Jeremy's mother showed up unannounced. She was falling-down drunk, he said, and she berated the children on the opposing team and then mooned an umpire.

Buck got choked up when he talked about how he and Gail had grown so fond of Jeremy and Jennifer that they considered adopting them. But the child-welfare services, determined to reunite the family, chose to place them back with their mother, though only after she could prove to them she had something to cook on. She purchased a hot plate. Hill asked Buck how it made him feel that for Jeremy that was the best year of his life. ''I've been told that by several people,'' Buck said. ''I'm glad to be a part of that young man's life. It was a very good year for me too.''

Buck is an understated man, but several of the jurors came to share what they saw as his anger toward the state welfare workers. (He was also angry at Gross, Buck told me.) A number of the jurors noticed that during the Garners' testimony, Gross, for the first time in the trial, made eye contact with a witness. ''He latched onto those moments when good things were said about him,'' Garrison recalled. The Garners attended the remainder of the trial, something the jurors took note of, especially since Gross's mother didn't appear in the courtroom after giving her testimony. (Hill, it turns out, had asked her not to, since he thought she might have to take the stand again.)

In an effort to show that Gross, with some structure, could do well, Hill had a retired state Supreme Court justice testify to having watched Gross participate in a mock trial when he was a youth in a detention facility. The justice had been impressed by Gross's performance. Also, Gross's sixth-grade teacher testified about how he was so talented and such a hard worker that she'd place him in a corner of the classroom out of reach of the class troublemakers. Indeed, Gross, who liked school, received his high-school diploma on time.

Carrie Tuterow, 32, was the youngest juror. She has wavy red hair and an open face, and at the time of the trial, she worked at a day-care center. Her outgoing spirit and assuredness seems the perfect temperament for such work. After convicting Gross, Tuterow had been certain of the appropriate punishment: death. And then the Garners testified. ''I made my decision when I heard their testimony,'' she told me. ''I remember writing home that I figured out why I was here.''

Tuterow thought about her husband. He'd been taken away from his mother when he was 2 and put up for adoption. Though her husband isn't certain, he has been led to believe that his mother would disappear for days at a time. Tuterow began to wonder what might have come of him had he stayed with his biological mother. ''At the point it became personal,'' she told me. ''I began to identify with Jeremy.'' One night, unable to sleep, she wrote her husband a letter that read: ''Whatever Jim didn't tell you is for the best.'' Jim was her husband's biological father. Having heard the testimony about Gross, she worried that news of his mother would be too difficult for her husband to hear.

Tuterow was so drained by the trial that in the evenings she was unable to paste any of the family photos she'd brought with her into the scrapbooks. ''Last night,'' she wrote in another letter to her husband, ''I had some strange dreams . . . nightmares, really. That makes two nights in a row. A combination of what I hear, imagine and what I read before bed, I guess. . . . I read a little of 'At Home in Mitford.' Now I have nightmares of murders in a small town.''

Her husband sent her a bouquet of spring flowers. ''My husband had a chance,'' Tuterow told me, ''but there was no way Jeremy had a chance.''

As Hill told Jeremy's story, the prosecution pounded away in its cross-examinations at the idea that not everyone who has had a difficult life ends up committing murder. What about his sister, Jennifer Gross? Or his stepbrother, Marion Higgenbotham? Neither had ever committed a crime of any sort.

So Hill had Jennifer and Marion tell their stories. Jennifer, who had been sexually molested by her father and had a child out of wedlock, sought counseling on her own. This is what saved her, she told the jurors. And in Marion's case, Hill brought Richard Dullaghan to testify. Dullaghan is an icon in sports-crazed Indiana. As football coach of Ben Davis High School, he has won five state championships. When Dullaghan, an open-faced, gray-haired man, took the witness stand, Hill asked him about the large ring he was wearing. It's from when he was inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame, Dullaghan told him.

Dullaghan spoke not about Gross, whom he'd never met -- Gross's mother had been unable or unwilling to come up with the fees for him to play football -- but rather about Marion, who was the punt snapper on the high-school football team. Marion had testified the previous day that Dullaghan had been a kind of father figure for him, and that that helped keep him out of trouble. ''I always tell my players, I'm your dad away from home,'' Dullaghan told the jurors. The implication, of course, was that Gross's mother had denied him every avenue to a better life, including the opportunity to have a stand-in parent like Coach Dullaghan. On his way out out of the courtroom, Dullaghan affectionately patted Marion on the head, a gesture that some jurors noted as a sharp contrast to the detachment of Gross's parents.

When Gross turned 15, his mother remarried. A year later, her new husband gave her an ultimatum: either Jeremy goes or he goes. Gross moved into a one-bedroom apartment with seven friends. A teenage runaway girl testified that Gross made sure none of the guys in the apartment harmed her. She told the jurors that Gross encouraged her to return home and to go back to school. Another girl recounted how Gross had later given to her the one item that meant anything to him: his high-school diploma. He told her he didn't want anything to happen to it.

Three psychologists testified on Gross's behalf. They suggested he had been crying out for attention, and they pointed to a bungled robbery when he was 15, in which Gross, carrying a gun, took a pair of shoes from a store and fled on foot. In the ensuing chase, Gross shot himself in the leg. He was sent to juvenile detention, where he fared rather well. The psychologists testified to his ability to thrive under structure.

The prosecutors asked of one psychologist: ''Was he compelled to commit those acts?'' At one point, exasperated by the painting of Gross as a victim, one prosecutor suggested that ''it almost sounds as if the criminal-justice system would be cruel to punish a person for committing a criminal act.''

Elizabeth Stone, one of two jurors who marked on their questionnaire that they strongly favored the death penalty (the other was the machine operator, Sandra Logan), had early on been annoyed by Hill. ''I could see how much he was trying to manipulate us,'' she recalled. ''It made me angry.'' Then Gross's story unfolded. ''When you think about the death penalty in the abstract,'' she told me, ''you don't think about individuals.''

Stone and I met at a local restaurant. She seemed wary of revisiting the trial, and in fact it took a couple of phone calls to persuade her to meet with me. She is soft-spoken, with sad eyes and shortly cropped auburn hair. ''It's unsettling to me because it was so violent,'' she told me, looking away. It took me a few minutes to realize she wasn't talking about the murder, but rather about Gross's life.

All but one juror I spoke with referred to Gross by his first name, as if they were speaking of a family member or friend; a few, in fact, couldn't remember the name of the victim. Two arguments ultimately swayed Stone. At one point, Hill talked about studies that indicated that it was more expensive to put someone to death (mostly because of the inevitably lengthy appeals process) than it was to incarcerate them for life. But what most influenced her was something less tangible: she had come to genuinely care for Gross. She told me that it was clear that Gross was moved by some of the testimony, particularly his sister's. He looked to be tearing up, she told me, and she thought to herself that anyone with emotions might be able to be rehabilitated and make something of his life in prison.

uring closing arguments, Hill pulled up a chair in front of the jurors and sat down. He'd once seen an attorney he admired do the same, to help defuse a charged moment. But he also fretted that his emotions would get the best of him.

''I think I'm too nervous to move around,'' he told the jurors. ''The law says that we're supposed to sentence people to death that are the worst of the worst. . . . Jeremy Gross is not the worst of the worst. I think you all sense that in your hearts.'' He periodically pointed to a chart that one psychologist had put together listing all the risk factors in Gross's life and reminded the jurors how Gross, despite the parental neglect, could be nurturing, both to friends whom he urged to stay in school and to other inmates, whom he read to and tutored. ''You kill Jeremy,'' he told the jurors, ''you kill those good things that are existent in his heart, and that's wrong.''

Toward the end of his closing, jurors could hear the desperation in Hill's pleas. One juror said Hill spoke of Gross as if he were a son. ''I'm begging you,'' Hill appealed, ''to spare his life.''

If at this point you're angry that there has been so little about Christopher Beers, the victim, you're not alone. The prosecutors tried, without success, to introduce how much Beers's death had affected those around him. Most states allow some amount of victim impact statements. Some even allow victims' family members to testify about why they think death is the appropriate sentence. But Indiana doesn't permit testimony about the victim. ''You come away feeling that the playing field is tilted,'' Newman, the former prosecutor said. ''The only person who becomes humanized is the defendant. The victim becomes a cipher.''

It particularly frustrated Gill, the young prosecutor, who knew how strongly Beers's family believed that Gross deserved death. ''Mr. Hill has asked you for compassion,'' Gill began. ''The State of Indiana is asking you for justice.'' Gill told the jury in his closing statement that Jeremy had, indeed, graduated from high school, that he had, indeed, advised others on how to live an honorable life. ''Jeremy's childhood is not an excuse for what happened on this videotape,'' he said. ''He can distinguish from right and wrong. He does know how to improve his life. It comes down to the fact that he chose not to.'' Before stepping down, Gill, one last time, played the 41 seconds of videotape. It was his exclamation point. It underscored the brutality of the crime and Gross's unquestionable guilt. A few of the jurors avoided looking at the television. ''I'd seen it enough,'' one of them told me.

As the jury prepared to leave, one spectator muttered, loud enough for some of the jurors to hear, ''He's getting away with murder.''

The jurors were escorted to the jury room, a small, unadorned space, where Garrison, the foreman, let everyone collect themselves. The 12 jurors mulled silently for half an hour, helping themselves to cans of pop and orange juice from one of two small refrigerators. They then convened around an oval-shaped, laminated wood table. Since it could accommodate only eight chairs, four of the jurors had to sit against the wall. One juror could be heard mumbling, ''I don't want to be doing this.'' It's how many of them felt. On a blackboard, Carrie Tuterow wrote down the options: death, life without parole and a determinate sentence. Garrison suggested they first take a vote, and so everyone, anonymously, wrote on a piece of paper where he or she stood.

They were surprised by how similar many of them were in their thinking. Nine voted for life without parole, one for a term of years and two for death. Garrison asked each of them to state his or her case, and it soon became evident who was in the minority. Cheryl Berkowitz, the recovering addict, thought Gross deserved another chance, and so said he should have a chance to get out of prison someday. Berkowitz, though, was fairly reticent during deliberations; she chose not to share her own story, as she feared that the other jurors' anger toward Gross's mother would be transferred to her.

A juror named Darlene Sue (she requested that her last name not be used), who had read the Bible every night searching for answers, believed Gross should die. She told her fellow jurors that over the course of the trial she'd come to believe that the Old Testament's notion of an eye for an eye made sense, and she read a short passage from the Bible she had with her. ''He wasn't so scarred by his childhood that he didn't know right from wrong,'' she told me. ''I remember his friends who he was living with in the trailer, saying that he talked them into staying in school. That told me he knew what he was doing. ''

The other juror who initially voted for death also quoted from the Bible, about not sitting in judgment of others. She soon switched her vote.

Garrison wavered. He agreed with Darlene Sue that clearly Gross had a moral compass, but he felt that the abuse that he endured as a child had shattered it. ''I began to think not that there's an excuse for what happened, but I had an understanding of his torment,'' he said. ''Sympathetic is too strong a word, but I can't think of a better way to describe how I felt. I struggled with whether he knew the difference between right and wrong.'' (Garrison said he repeatedly reminded himself of the gruesomeness of the crime, conjuring the one image that haunted most of them, the photograph of Christopher Beers lying face down by the dangling pay phone.)

At one point, one juror said: ''Everyone knows a Jeremy. Every neighborhood has a Jeremy.'' Sandra Logan, who had kept to herself, talked of how the social-service agencies, the courts and his parents had failed Gross, a sentiment echoed by others. Privately, she considered her relationship with her son who'd been to prison. ''To me, Gross's parents threw him away,'' she said. ''Even to this day, with my son and all the problems he's had, he's still my son.'' It became clear that for some of the jurors, they saw some of Gross's frailties echoed in their own lives. Others were struck by how well Gross seemed to do when he was in detention, when he was in a supervised environment. ''Maybe,'' suggested Tuterow, in prison ''he'd touch someone else's life.''

One juror mentioned the outburst at the end of the trial, that Gross was getting away with murder. She argued that life without parole was, in fact, a pretty severe punishment. In fact, some thought that it was a harsher sentence than death. ''He seemed to be a kid with a conscience,'' Garrison said. ''That killing's going to weigh on him every day.''

The jurors took several breaks, including one to eat pizza for dinner. On the fourth vote, Darlene Sue gave in, though reluctantly. She worried that if a mistrial was declared, another jury might sentence Gross to a term with the chance of parole. The votes were tallied. It was unanimous. ''I said, 'We have a sentence of life,''' Garrison recalled. ''And everybody in the room -- and I mean everybody -- started crying.'' They waited nearly an hour to gather their composure before buzzing for the bailiff.

Many of the jurors told me that when they returned home, family, friends and colleagues at work chastised them for not putting Gross to death. Some of the jurors tried to convey the details of Gross's life, but it sounded like they were making excuses for him and for themselves. One juror would simply tell friends, ''Well, you haven't been where I've been,'' and leave it at that.

One night over dinner, Elizabeth Stone told her sister and brother about Gross's life. ''It didn't seem to impress them at all,'' she said. They said they still believed that Stone should have voted for death. ''We just turned the conversation to other things,'' she told me. They never spoke about the trial again.

One juror sank into a deep depression and missed two months of work. Tuterow talked with her husband about starting a shelter for abandoned and neglected children. For many months after the trial, Garrison told me: ''I found myself going out of my way to listen and watch kids I knew. Just wondering. Hopefully, this isn't the next Jeremy. I guess in the end -- and maybe this is hard to admit -- I had trouble separating the facts of the crime from my sympathy for Jeremy.''

A number of the jurors said they had considered writing Gross, to urge him to tutor and pursue his own education in prison, to take advantage of the chance they'd given him. They exchanged addresses with one another and talked of a reunion, but it never happened. It was, they each told me separately, probably just as well. The memories of the trial are still painful. Even three years later, some of the jurors I spoke with got teary-eyed when recounting some of the testimony.

The trial also had an unexpected effect on Gill, the young prosecutor. ''I was surprised by the feelings of sympathy I had for Jeremy,'' he told me. ''That caught me off guard. You don't learn in law school how to deal with the penalty phase. Nothing prepares you for that.'' I asked Gill whether he thought Gross deserved to die. He reclined in his chair and pondered the question for a minute or two. ''Yes,'' he said. Then he added, ''But I'm not dissatisfied with the jury's decision.''

Twelve jurors -- each of whom was convinced that some people, given the cruelty of their acts, deserve to die -- chose to spare a life. To some, it might seem as if they copped out, that they're hypocritical. To others, their action might appear courageous. What is clear, at least to most of them, is that they no longer feel as certain about the death penalty as they once had.

''It got me thinking that we all have circumstances in our lives that are mitigating, so I don't know how you make that judgment,'' Elizabeth Stone told me over lunch earlier this year. She had initially been reluctant to talk with me, and she was clearly reticent, her voice so soft that it was sometimes difficult to hear her. It was, it turns out, the first time since the dinner with her siblings that she'd spoken with anyone about the trial. She was still wrestling with her decision, she said, and in fact had saved the 42 pages of notes she had taken during the trial, as well as newspaper stories about the case that her sons had clipped for her.

I reminded her at one point that on her questionnaire she indicated that she strongly believed in capital punishment. ''It's a tough issue,'' she said, sounding a tad defensive. ''And until you're put in the hot seat, you don't know how you'll act.''

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of ''There Are No Children Here'' and ''The Other Side of the River.''

LUNCH WITH AGNES

[from greg.org:]

TAOS POSTCARD
LUNCH WITH AGNES
Issue of 2003-07-14 and 21, Posted 2003-07-07
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030714ta_talk_ross

Agnes Martin, the Saskatchewan-born Abstract Expressionist painter—a contemporary of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman—whose tranquil paintings are in the Whitney, the Guggenheim, moma, and other museums, abandoned New York a good three decades ago to live spartanly and to work, somewhat reclusively, in New Mexico. Now residing in Taos at the age of ninety-one, she was due the other day to be called on at the small bungalow she lives in near the big Taos Mountain, by her friend and neighbor Tony Huston, in his white pickup truck. He is a master falconer and a screenwriter (of, among other movies, a film of James Joyce’s “The Dead” made by his father, John Huston).

“Every now and then, I get to have lunch with Agnes,” Huston said. “There’s such solidity in her presence. She’s not wobbly. She occupies all the space given to her. In 1997, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. The next year, President Clinton gave her the National Medal of Arts. Her paintings sell for millions, her dealer says. She spends a lot of time just sitting, painting in her head.

“She finds serenity and power in the Taos Mountain, as so many of us here do,” he went on, driving bossily over a sun-blinding, narrow dirt road leading to Martin’s home. “Either the mountain likes you or it doesn’t, and I’m sure the mountain likes Agnes.”

He turned off the dirt road into a circular enclave called Plaza de Retiro. A spotless white E320 Mercedes was parked in front of her place. “Her car’s here,” he said. He knocked on the door and peered into the window. “But she’s not home. She probably got a ride to her studio.”

Not long after, he found her, in her studio, in a three-hundred-year-old adobe cottage half a mile away. The studio has white walls, a skylight, and a small window with shutters, and inside it was arranged simply: a work table with paintbrushes and three rulers; a couple of chairs. Hanging on a wall was a painting in progress—a five-by-five-foot white canvas with one blue stripe at the top.

Agnes Martin has a full, strong, sun-browned face that looks as if it belonged on Mt. Rushmore. She has gray hair, cut straight with bangs, in what used to be called a Buster Brown style, and she is muscular and full-bodied, with large, strong, thick-fingered hands. She was wearing black sneakers, bluejeans, and a blue tunic of thick Guatemalan cloth, with four engraved silver buttons going down from the neckline. “The silver buttons come from Tony Reyna’s shop on the Pueblo reservation—no tax,” she said. “I want to get more of these silver buttons.

“Tomorrow, I’ll drive myself over here,” she said. “I have twenty-twenty vision. A policeman just gave me the driver’s test. He said I was a good driver.”

Huston and Martin started talking about painting, and he asked whether she allows her dealer’s opinions to influence her work.

“No, I paint to myself,” she said. “It comes from outside. I don’t believe in that inner stuff. You sit and wait. I’m always painting in my imagination. They go so quickly in your imagination. I only work three and a half hours a day. Painting is hard work. It’s very hard to paint straight. You paint vertically, but the paintings hang horizontally—there are no drips that way.”

The happiest part of making paintings, she continued, is “when they go out the door and into the world. They go straight to my dealer, Arne Glimcher, at Pace Wildenstein. It used to be simpler. They used to fly and get there in one day. Now they have to be in fancy crates, and they go by truck to New York. Takes five days.”

It was well before noon. She had eaten breakfast, she said, at her routine time, 6:30 a.m., in the communal dining room at her enclave.

“I don’t eat supper,” she said. “And I never watch television. I have no television. I have no radio. For news, I read the headlines on the local papers. I listen to music. On CDs. Beethoven’s Ninth. Beethoven is really about something. I go to bed at 7 p.m. I go to sleep when it gets dark, get up when it’s light. Like a chicken. Let’s go to lunch.”

At Huston’s truck, she hoisted herself nimbly into the front seat for the drive to a restaurant, close to the Taos Mountain. It had grown cloudy. There was a distant rumble of thunder. At the restaurant, a waitress poured water. Martin drank almost a full glass. “This water is so good,” she said. “I’ll have the mushroom-filled ravioli. Yesterday, I had bratwurst and sauerkraut.” Huston asked whether she ever missed New York.

Without skipping a beat, she said, “They tore down my wonderful studio there. They put a Chemical Bank in its place. I worked for thirteen years in that studio. A sailmaker’s loft, on Coenties Slip. It was right on the East River, so close I could see the expressions on the faces of the sailors. That’s when I was friends with Barney Newman. We’d talk about Picasso, who was a good painter because he worked hard. But he had a lot of goofy ideas. I liked Andy Warhol, but I was afraid to go visit him because of his friends. Barney would do wonderful talk with me. He’d say about painting, ‘It’s transcendent.’ A lot of people didn’t believe him. But I did. It has to be about life. Barney and the other Abstract Expressionists gave up defined space, and they gave up forms. They all liked my paintings. I feel as though I owe them a debt. Barney hung my shows. Too bad about Barney. The doctor told him to stop, to give it up. Because it’s hard work. So he gave it up, but he started again, and he died of a heart attack.” She drank another glass of water. “This water is so good,” she said again.

— Lillian Ross

Galaxy of Asian Gods Is Sighted in Chicago

Galaxy of Asian Gods Is Sighted in Chicago
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/arts/design/09HIMA.html

CHICAGO — You are traveling by bus a few hours out of Katmandu in Nepal. The sun is falling fast as the road climbs. When the bus stops to refuel, you climb out and look up at a new moon high in the sky. Then with a little surprise you look higher and see, above the moon, the snow-covered tops of mountains.

They are the Himalayas, and they are some of the highest places on earth. If you could continue straight through them, you would be in Tibet. A turn to the left would take you to Kashmir; to the right, east toward China. At this point you are still in the foothills, but with a single neck-craning glance you know why people believe that gods live here.

This summer an entire pantheon of Hindu gods has touched down at the Art Institute of Chicago, along with the Buddha and his band of spirits and saints. They are here for "Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure," a survey of nearly 200 sculptures and paintings, most of them on loan from North American collections, some among the finest examples of their kind.

The art historian Pratapaditya Pal, who organized the show, writes in the catalog that his intention was to create a masterpiece show, one based on "aesthetic excellence" rather than on focused themes or theory. That goal is disappointingly unadventurous given the idea-packed nature of the objects assembled, but Dr. Pal's success in shaping them into a truly fabulous spectacle is beyond question. The show starts in Nepal, a kingdom sandwiched between India and Tibet. Hinduism, imported from the south, is the state religion there today, and among the striking early pieces in this show is a 10th-century Nepali relief of the god Siva and his family kicking back on a craggy ledge of Mount Kailasa, their Himalayan home, in a court as crowded with dancers as a disco floor.

But Buddhism, technically, originated here when, in the sixth century B.C. a tribal prince named Siddartha was born in territory within Nepal's present borders. As a prince he was raised to be a ruler of men; later, as the Buddha, he learned to rule himself, by far the harder task. Many of his devotees considered him divine, and while he denied this, his image takes complex forms, human and transcendent.

A fabulous gilded copper sculpture on loan from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth embodies both. Here the Buddha is an earthly sage and a savior. Lithe and youthful in a simple monk's robe, he holds one flowerlike hand open in a gesture of giving that is also a gesture of letting go: of possessions, desires, ego, everything.

This piece from the seventh-century A.D. has clear links to Indian art of roughly the same period. And one of the exhibition's subtexts is the flow of Indian influence into the Himalayas, where it produced many diverse but related styles. The mechanics of that diffusion remain something of a mystery, however, in part because Himalayan material remains understudied, but also because so much of it has been lost.

Only a relatively small amount of ancient Hindu and Buddhist art survives, for example, from what is now the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir in India. Yet the ancient religious sculpture of this region adds up to one of the great art traditions of Asia, and the show — which travels in reduced form to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington in the fall — would be irresistible for its Kashmiri section alone.

It includes some wonderful Hindu pieces, among them an eighth-century relief of Kamadeva, the god of love, surrounded by his sexpot consorts. But it is Buddhist sculpture that takes the prize, its power distilled in three stellar works. One, a renowned gilded bronze from the Norton Simon Foundation, depicts the Buddha at the instant of enlightenment, sitting on a cushion patterned with silver and copper inlay, a Kashmiri specialty. In another he looks as regal as a Byzantine emperor, with honey-gold skin and hypnotic, silver-inlaid eyes.

The third and grandest image centers around three bodhisattvas — spiritual beings who stay in the world to guide mortal creatures to salvation — preening on lotus-shaped platforms like Olympic medal winners. The entire ensemble, with its gilded aureole of swirls and swags, has a baroque exuberance that would have been enhanced by the flickering light of oil lamps in the dark interior of a shrine.

Color and interesting complications arrive with a 12th-century painting from western Tibet in which the Buddha, dressed in a snazzy patchwork robe, keeps company with a Hindu god or two. Such interfaith meetings are not unusual. Buddhism routinely lifted elements from other religions. The same was true of Hinduism, which adopted the Buddha as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. Hybridity had a lot to do with the success of both religions, and you can see it in action here: what looks like a baby-blue dove hovering over the Buddha's head is actually Garuda, the half-human, half-bird creature who served as Vishnu's mount.

Eclecticism is certainly the name of the game in the show's large final section of art from central and eastern Tibet, with its suggestion of sources as far flung as Persia and China. This is the kind of Himalyan material most familiar from Western collections, though Dr. Pal's choices are refreshingly varied, from a bronze bodhisattva modeled on Indian sculptural ideals — the body is a composite of plant and animal forms — to an exquisitely executed painting of the holy man Virupa, drunk and disorderly, and stopping the sun in its tracks in order to delay last call at the bar.

Images as entrancing as these would seem to disarm any reservations about the show's aestheticist agenda. But I wonder. Progressive thinking about art in the 1990's emphasized the social dynamics of art and the political implications of concepts like "beauty," while conservative voices warned that such thinking would produce a crushing tidal wave of theory-heavy, object-poor shows.

The reality is, that wave never hit. Connoisseurial concerns continue to be privileged just as they have always been. In the field of Asian art challenges to historical orthodoxy have on the whole been tentative and fleeting. Yet for some reason, perhaps spurred by the current political climate, the protests go on and have recently grown even louder, with calls for museums to get back to art-speaks-for-itself basics, as if they had ever put such shopworn attitudes aside.

"Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure," with its travel-brochure title and its boilerplate gorgeousness, steers close to such an approach. True, I would gladly travel to Chicago again before Aug. 17, when the show closes, for another lingering look: the objects are that beautiful. But they are also carriers of revolutionary concepts about personal, social and political transformations of a kind we barely comprehend and that the exhibition barely touches on. The art in question is life changing rather than merely life enhancing. Intellectually as well as materially, it scales the heights. Shouldn't exhibitions strive to do the same?

Settling into Hanoi

its been a busy two weeks since i first arrived in hanoi. hard to believe its really been that long. but i've been adjusting to the heat, the daily routine, and a little work. after a long day at the office, errands, and dinner, i've been too exhausted to do almost anything else. so haven't done any real exploring yet, but i'm going to start later this week.

for some reason, i'd been expecting problems with my laptop, and came prepared with system disks and other installation software. but i didn't expect my first problem to be the failure of one of my laptop's two screen hinges.

after taking the broken pieces apart, the hinge is surprisingly thin, albeit made of some ultra strong and thin metal. the problem is that this is a very specific part for a very specific machine. and after trying quite a few places, i think it will be impossible to get the right parts here in vietnam. although i can still use it, it would be too easy to break the other hinge with a little leveraged torque of opening and closing the screen. so later this week, i'm going to leave the laptop to the mercy of the most respectable place we found who will attempt a fix.

the second hiccup to my trip occurred this weekend on a short trip to Cat Ba Island, off the coast of Halong Bay. after a 2.5 hour bus and 2 hour boat trip, we arrived at a pleasant resort island with a port and main street hotels sheltered on one side of steep island peaks. after settling into our hotel, we went to have an early dinner at one of the floating restaurants in the small harbor. although the squid was overcooked, the nem and pork were excellent.

after we finished however, we were hanging out at our table enjoying the view, when the restaurant staff asked us to move tables for a "family" that just arrived, even though the restaurant was still empty. we obliged, as they sat down at our table. but then, on our way to our next table, realized that i had left my small digital camera on one of the chairs. we quickly went back, but any attempt to explain our situation to the people who had sat down at our table drew angry "go away" signals. obviously they didn't want to be bothered.

we spent the next forty minutes, to no avail, trying to explain to the management and our hotel manager (who could speak some english and graciously came to try and figure out a solution). the restaurant manager didn't even want to talk to the people himself! [we figured maybe they were local mafia or something.] but it was still infuriating to know that we had left the camera there, that the "family" there had taken it, and that there was no way to get them to cough it up!!

thankfully upon returning to hanoi, we were able to locate two places that had similar cameras that i could buy to replace it, but we had a similarly frustrating experience with one of the stores. thankfully, the other store (www.the220.com) was very professional and didn't try to rip us off, or pass off what seemed to be slightly used merchandise.

other than that, we've had surprisingly good food. in addition to vietnamese nem (spring rolls) and pho bo (beef noodles), we've had a very good gourmet styled dim sum (Daewoo Hotel), korean barbeque and mandoo (Han Kook Kwan), a japanese sushi buffet (Capitol Hotel), chinese duck and fried tofu (Hong Deng Long), and an excellent cream pasta (Puku Cafe).

the city seems pretty deserted, except for hoards of vietnamese on motorbikes and bicycles. compared to two years ago, there are virtually *no* tourists except a bare handful or two. on the weekdays, the restaurants and cafes seem mostly empty. its nice in a way, but also sadly quiet.

on sunday, we went to an American 4th of July outdoor party at the american club with hamburgers, hotdogs, french fries, and a navy band playing popular and jazz tunes on a large enclosed lawn in the middle of the city. it was nice to meet a few expats and some of the people that worked at the embassy. and even though it started to pour toward the end, that only helped concentrate everyone standing under an enclosed deck, where it was much easier to socialize than sitting around the many picnic tables on the grass.

anyway, more pictures to come...

Justice, Safety and the System: A Witness Is Slain in Brooklyn

Justice, Safety and the System: A Witness Is Slain in Brooklyn
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/nyregion/06WITN.html

It had been nearly 10 months since Bobby Gibson had watched a stranger dressed in black ride a bicycle into a Brooklyn schoolyard, draw a gun from his waistband and kill his friend.

Now he was ready to walk into a courtroom to testify in the murder case. But on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the word had been out for months: "lie or die," as one neighborhood girl put it. The half brother of the defendant in the schoolyard shooting, himself a suspect in another slaying, was said to be tracking down witnesses. People said money had changed hands. Eyewitness accounts had been recanted.

Still, on June 27, 2002, with the trial set to begin, Bobby Gibson's name was there, on a list of witnesses read aloud in a courtroom on the seventh floor of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Two days later, Bobby Gibson was dead, shot through the heart a block from the schoolyard where his friend had been killed.

The murder of a witness is a calamity for the American legal system — not shocking, perhaps, in the world of international drug trafficking, but close to unthinkable in New York. There are supposed to be effective protections and programs.

But Bobby Gibson, prosecutors said, was killed precisely because he was going to testify — slain at 21 after his name was turned over to the defense, and after a whispered courtroom exchange between the schoolyard suspect and the suspect's half brother.

The New York Times spent three months examining the killing of Bobby Gibson and the question of witness protection in New York City — compiling statistics on witness intimidation, reviewing trial transcripts, audiotaped testimony and grand jury records, and interviewing police officers, prosecutors and friends and relatives of Bobby Gibson.

The picture that emerges is disturbing.

At least five people with ties to the schoolyard case have testified or said in interviews that witnesses, including Bobby Gibson, told law enforcement officials about threats or asked for protection, and were ignored. The police and prosecutors deny this.

Testimony shows, and prosecutors have indicated in court, that in the month before Bobby Gibson was killed, a prominent defense lawyer, Michael Warren, was used in what prosecutors charge was a plot by the suspect's half brother to coerce three teenage girls into changing their testimony. The lawyer said he had no reason to believe anything improper had occurred, and was shocked when Bobby Gibson wound up dead.

The killing of Bobby Gibson was not a complete anomaly. At least 19 witnesses have been killed in New York City since 1980. Around the state in the last seven years, local district attorneys have charged at least 14 people with killing witnesses.

New York City prosecutors, wading through a sea of daily cases, admit they have limited resources with which to maintain witness protection programs. The programs in the city vary borough by borough, and statewide some counties do not have them at all.

In New York City, "you can't afford to put people up in a hotel and have armed guards for them in every case," said Anthony J. Schepis, an executive assistant district attorney in the Bronx, "because there just are not the resources."

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, would not personally answer questions about the killing of Bobby Gibson. Other prosecutors in his office provided partial accounts. The last prosecutor to meet with Bobby Gibson — they met barely a day before the trial was to start after the case was handed off by another member of Mr. Hynes's office — prepared a memorandum about his last-minute substitution, parts of which were read to a reporter.

Senior police officials in Brooklyn defended their performance, and said, in a claim dismissed by prosecutors, that they did not think Bobby Gibson's killing was connected to his scheduled testimony.

In the end, numerous witnesses, including the three teenage girls, did testify and helped to convict the schoolyard killer. But the witnesses, and more than a dozen other friends and relatives, remain in hiding as the trial nears in the killing of Bobby Gibson. Prosecutors asked that the three girls be identified only by their nicknames — Naia, Mookie and Quanna.

Still, the witnesses' detailed testimony — including the girls' descriptions of threats and bribes, and the claim that their anxiety was ignored — is a matter of public record, and was used to piece together the story of Bobby Gibson's killing. The girls' decision to testify was reported in an article by The Associated Press last fall.

Sylvia Gibson, Bobby's mother, has notified the city that she intends to sue over the death of her son. Bobby Gibson was a product of some rough Brooklyn streets, but he had a job, girlfriends and, his mother said, a determination to stand up after his friend was gunned down.

The system, she said, failed him.

"All they wanted was his testimony," she said of prosecutors. "They weren't concerned with his safety. They were just trying to make their case."

It Started With a Slap

The path to two murders began on an August night in 2001, in the schoolyard behind Public School 23 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A teenage girl said something to a hotheaded 20-year-old, who did something stupid. "I smacked her," the young man, Corey Brown, later testified. Then he smacked her friend.

In the worn Brooklyn neighborhood, near the corner of Tompkins and Willoughby Avenues, people call the blacktop behind the school a park. On summer nights, young people gathered on the benches — some harmless kids, others with criminal records and gang affiliations. There was liquor and marijuana, cheap talk and short tempers.

The three teenage girls were best friends and schoolyard regulars. Bobby Gibson was one of the regulars, too. A 10th-grade dropout, he was a slender young man with earnest brown eyes and a job at a McDonald's on Fulton Street. He was known by his middle name, Kareem, or K for short, a name given to him by his mother after the basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Bobby had moved to Crown Heights after growing up in the neighborhood. But he always came back — to his friends, to the schoolyard, to the trouble that could unfold there.

His best friend was Corey Brown. Corey had an ominous street name — Slay — and an older brother, Dennis. The brothers, both round in the face with gap-toothed smiles, were often mistaken for each other.

People told Dennis he looked like the heavyset, doomed character Doughboy in John Singleton's film "Boyz N the Hood." Everyone called him Doughboy. He took to the name, and tattooed it on his right arm.

In the schoolyard that August night, Corey Brown was drunk, as usual. One girl told him to get away, and he slapped her. He smacked a second girl, too — the girlfriend of a 17-year-old from the neighborhood, Corey McCullough. The two Coreys tussled. Corey McCullough did not have a reputation for toughness — prosecutors themselves later referred to him as "the Lamb" — but he had his pride.

A few weeks later, the prosecutors said, the Lamb brought his wounded pride back to the schoolyard. He did not come alone.

The Killing of Doughboy Brown

It was dusk. The summer days were beginning to shorten. Bobby and the others were at the benches. Corey Brown was there, with Doughboy.

Two young men, one dressed in black, came into the schoolyard. They were on bikes. It was Sept. 4, 2001.

On one bike was Corey McCullough. On the other was Wesley Sykes. He had been shot in the face at age 16 and left with a glass eye — an eye that to everyone looked white, somehow dead. He was 21, and from a nearby housing project.

The testimony from witnesses was exacting about what happened next: Wesley Sykes, a black baseball cap low on his head, studied the group of regulars. He made a circle on his bike and then returned. "I felt something wasn't right," said one witness.

Bobby Gibson picked up the narrative for investigators: "The pace on the bike," he said in a tape-recorded interview, "was getting slower and slower, and he looked, looked at every one of us on the bench, staring for a while."

There were whispered comments between the bike riders. Then, according to trial testimony, Wesley Sykes, his distinctive dead eye catching the attention of everyone on the benches, said something about disrespect, got off his bike, and pulled a black gun from his jeans.

He pointed it toward Corey Brown. Then, one of the schoolyard regulars testified, he pointed it toward Doughboy, as if confused. The brothers were next to each other.

Doughboy put his hands up. "Yo, son. I don't know what you talking about," he said. "It's not me."

Two bullets tore into his stomach. Wesley Sykes fired into the fleeing crowd. Corey Brown ran as well, but then returned. He dropped to the ground, he later testified, took his bleeding brother in his arms and asked him, "Was you hit?"

"He just told me his stomach was burning," Corey Brown testified.

Nine operations over the next 23 days could not save Doughboy, and he died at Bellevue Hospital Center on Sept. 27, 2001.

That October, Wesley Sykes was arrested in the killing of Doughboy Brown. The police had each of the men in a lineup wear an eye patch so the flash of white beneath Wesley Sykes's drooping eyelid would not give him away. Five witnesses identified Wesley Sykes as the killer that day: the three teenage girls, Corey Brown and Bobby Gibson.

The Intimidation Problem

No one knows how many criminal cases evaporate because witnesses are threatened or assaulted. But if the prosecutors are right about what happened to Bobby Gibson, the case brings to light a seldom-seen defiance of the system. Some prosecutors acknowledge that fear among witnesses is a staple of their work lives.

"We deal with it every day of the week, seven days a week," said Michael J. Mansfield, an executive assistant Queens district attorney who is in charge of his office's witness protection program. A rare report from 1990 by Victim Services, a nonprofit agency, found that 36 percent of victims and witnesses in cases in Bronx Criminal Court said they had been threatened.

Tellingly, a United States Department of Justice study this year found that nationally, only about half of violent crimes committed against people 12 and older are reported. The report provided evidence of fear's effect on victims and other witnesses, said Susan Herman, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, in Washington.

"If people felt they could rely on police and prosecutors for basic protection," she said, "you wouldn't have so many people opting out of the system."

In fact, a 1995 Justice Department study said prosecutors reported that intimidation was present in 75 to 100 percent of cases in some neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent. It also said that prosecutors in 18 urban areas during that period of higher crime rates said violent acts of intimidation, including homicides, kneecappings and beatings, occurred regularly.

"Many cases do not go forward, because the victim does not come in," said Mr. Schepis, the Bronx prosecutor.

An Unwelcome Visitor

It wasn't long after Doughboy's death, with the trial of Wesley Sykes still months off, that Bobby Gibson began to get menacing messages. The girls from the schoolyard brought them, his mother said. Dupree Harris, Wesley Sykes's half brother, wanted to speak to Bobby.

At 240 pounds, Dupree Harris was an imposing hulk of a man. He had a big face and a black mustache. He also had a half-dozen aliases and a street name, Turf. The police had identified him as a local Bloods gang leader, and he had twice been imprisoned.

Turf, 28, had been arrested on gun, drug and robbery charges. He had also been arrested in the 1993 killing of a man who had been shot in the head, although the charges were eventually dropped. The summer of the schoolyard shooting, though, the police in Brooklyn were investigating him in a second murder, from 1999. In that case, they say, he shot a 23-year-old man in the heart in an argument over a girl.

On the streets, as 2001 faded and the trial loomed, the girls, Bobby and Corey heard about Turf's reputation. The streets, the girls later testified, were awash in rumors that Turf had stayed out of prison for a brutally straightforward reason: He killed witnesses. Turf flatly denies this.

The girls testified that Turf made his first contact through an intermediary. The girls said the contact was not subtle: "Talk to him because if you don't take the money, you're going to die."

Turf, the girls said, then began visiting them. "He was coming like every day, every other day, telling us what to say," Naia testified. In time, the girls testified, he gave them a total of $2,000.

Turf was soft-spoken. He was persuasive. He began correcting the version of events they had given officials. "He told me," Mookie testified, "that I made a mistake when I said I think the boy has a glass eye."

Bobby Gibson told friends that the demand that he stay quiet had been delivered to him more emphatically. Corey Brown, his best friend, said Bobby had told him he was stopped in the neighborhood one day by a young man he had never seen before. The man, Corey said, pulled a gun on Bobby, said nothing and then departed.

Meanwhile, Bobby's mother said, the girls kept suggesting that Bobby meet Turf. Throughout, Bobby's mother said, he told the girls to stop bringing him messages.

Pleas to the Police

As the June trial drew near, the pressure built on the five witnesses. Corey Brown said he talked to the detective handling the case, Nadine Mosley, about his fear that someone might try to keep him from the witness chair. In May or early June, according to their testimony, two of the girls also went to the police. They talked, they said, about Turf's threats and his reputation.

The witnesses said their concerns prompted little action.

Mookie testified that they had been explicit with the detective. "She told us basically it was hearsay, and it was rumors," she said.

Corey Brown said the detective offered some help. She told him, he said, that he could be moved out of the neighborhood until the trial. But he said the detective also told him he would have to leave his infant child and other family members behind. He decided to tough it out.

The police in Detective Mosley's precinct knew who Turf was. After Bobby Gibson was killed, Detective Mosley testified at Wesley Sykes's trial that Turf was known as a leader of the Bloods gang. Other officers later said that, at the time, the effort to arrest Turf was one of the highest priorities of the 79th Precinct.

Detective Mosley would not be interviewed for this article. But her commander, Lt. Thomas R. Joyce, said the police would have acted aggressively if there was any hint of danger.

"I do not believe," he said, "that Detective Mosley was ever notified of tampering or threats to any witnesses."

Bobby Gibson, anyway, made clear to his mother that he felt he was being left on his own. She said Bobby had become convinced that, at minimum, the three girls' silence had been bought. They had new boots.

A Last-Minute Switch

Shortly after Doughboy was killed, Bobby Gibson, working with an assistant district attorney named Javier A. Solano, testified before the grand jury that indicted Wesley Sykes as the schoolyard gunman.

Thus, months later, Bobby's mother said, when her son sought protection before testifying against Wesley Sykes in open court, he naturally turned to the Brooklyn district attorney's office. Corey Brown, in fact, said Bobby had told prosecutors "everything."

But both Ms. Gibson and Corey Brown say nothing was done. Ms. Gibson said Bobby had told her the prosecutors changed the subject when he asked for protection. She said that Bobby asked for an escort to and from the district attorney's office as the trial neared. She said they called him a taxi.

In interviews, Mr. Solano said he did not remember any witnesses raising specific concerns about intimidation. "If someone witnesses a murder," he said, "everyone always has concerns."

The record shows, though, that Mr. Solano at least was aware that his witnesses did not want to be known to, or bothered by, people working with Wesley Sykes's defense.

On April 23, 2002, with the trial two months off, Mr. Solano wrote a letter to Mr. Sykes's lawyer. "They have indicated to me," he wrote of his witnesses, "that they would rather keep their names confidential." Recently, Mr. Solano said in an interview that the letter was routine, reflecting nothing more than a standard reluctance to talk to defense lawyers.

Still, one of the girls testified that roughly a month after Mr. Solano wrote his letter, she went to him and tried to back out of testifying. She went because she was afraid, she said, but she was vague about how much she had told Mr. Solano.

If prosecutors had ever heard Turf's name mentioned, they would have had plenty of reasons to be concerned.

Turf had been prosecuted repeatedly in Brooklyn. He was the prime suspect in the open 1999 murder case. And the ties between Turf and Wesley Sykes, half brothers, were easy to establish. They had lived together, and their family, police say, was known to Brooklyn law enforcement because of repeated drug investigations. Wesley, in fact, had once posted bail for Turf.

In the end, though, Bobby Gibson lost his only truly familiar contact with the prosecutor's office on the eve of trial. On June 26, the day before jury selection, the district attorney's office shifted the case from Mr. Solano and gave it to another prosecutor, Stephen J. Murphy. Mr. Solano had another murder case on his schedule.

Mr. Murphy, 29, had never worked on the schoolyard case before that day, prosecutors say. In a statement read to a reporter by a spokesman for the office, Mr. Murphy said that in his meeting with Bobby Gibson, he heard no mention of threats or fear. "Not one word," the statement said.

In fact, Jerry Schmetterer, the spokesman, said that none of the witnesses had mentioned any threats to any prosecutor. Prosecutors in the office said Bobby's mother's claims were confused, and driven by a desire to win a financial judgment.

Bobby slept those last nights in his grandmother's cramped apartment in Crown Heights. His mother, a former school aide living on disability benefits, had given up her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant to move in with her mother.

In an interview recently, Bobby's mother, seated at her mother's kitchen table, said Bobby was edgy as the trial neared.

"You don't know how serious this is," she recalled him saying.

Accounts Are Changed

The trial was three weeks away. Wesley Sykes's lawyer, Michael Warren, had an unusual visitor for a Sunday afternoon. He was in his office, on the first floor of his home on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn. It was June 9, 2002, about 4:30 p.m.

The visitor was Mookie, one of the schoolyard girls and one of the prosecution's main witnesses. Mr. Warren turned on a tape recorder and began asking questions about the killing. But first he mentioned where the interview was taking place. He mentioned the time and date. He might need to play the tape in court.

When tape-recording witnesses, it is often the practice of lawyers and law enforcement officers to say who is in the room. Neither Mr. Warren nor anyone else on the tapes ever mentioned that Turf was there.

It was Turf, the three girls later said, who had taken them to Mr. Warren's office, and had sat next to them. He knew what they would now say, the girls testified, because he had scripted it for them.

How Mr. Warren came to represent Wesley Sykes is not clear.

Mr. Warren gained prominence with such clients as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the terror mastermind. And he has most recently been in the spotlight as a lawyer for the men whose convictions were vacated in the Central Park jogger case. In that case, he argued that detectives had coerced false confessions from the young men.

It is clear Mr. Warren knew Turf, and in a recent interview Mr. Warren said he had represented him once before. The girls said Turf referred to Mr. Warren as his lawyer.

Mr. Warren did say that he had no inkling that Turf was a member of the Bloods. He said he had no reason to believe that the visits from the girls had been motivated by anything but their desire to tell the truth. A reporter heard the tapes this spring.

And so on that late afternoon in June 2002, under questioning from Mr. Warren, the first of the schoolyard girls, Mookie, quickly said the identification she had given the police of Wesley Sykes as the killer was wrong. "I didn't even see the boy," she said.

That visit was followed by another days later, at 5 p.m. It was Quanna's turn. She also gave a new account that could destroy her usefulness as a prosecution witness. She had just been repeating rumors, she said, when she told the police that the boy with the glass eye had killed Doughboy. "I didn't really see his face," she said.

Mr. Warren's defense of Wesley Sykes would be to try to blame the killing of Doughboy on Corey McCullough, the Lamb. That afternoon Quanna gave him material to work with. It was Corey McCullough, she said, who had a gun in the schoolyard.

"All you know," Mr. Warren summarized on the tape, "was that you saw an argument and Corey was with a gun. But you didn't know who shot who. O.K."

Three days before jury selection, on June 24, Naia came to Mr. Warren's office. She had seen Corey McCullough with a gun, not the boy with the glass eye, she said. She had identified Wesley Sykes in the lineup only because he was the only young suspect there. "I don't know the boy," she said.

Mr. Warren said in the interview that he knew nothing about any intimidation or bribery. "There is absolutely no knowledge I had of any impropriety in my office," he said. "Whatever might have gone on outside my office I had no knowledge of."

When they testified after Bobby Gibson was killed, the teenage girls described the trips to Mr. Warren's office in Turf's car as frightening. Inside Mr. Warren's office, they testified, Turf's coaching was obvious.

"Everything I was saying," Naia testified, "he told me to say. He was shaking his head to let me know that I was saying what he told me to say. And if I messed up or I didn't say the right thing, he would be like putting his head down."

Mr. Warren acknowledged that Turf had sat near each of the girls but said that he never noticed him signaling the girls. He mentioned that he asked each of the girls on the tape if they had come to his office voluntarily. Each said she had.

Naia later explained why. "I had to go with a lie," she testified. She said she wanted to get home safe.

The Unthinkable Happens

The worst had happened before. The grisly history of 19 or more witness killings in the city includes the case of Mildred Greene, a 61-year-old taxi dispatcher who happened to see a gun battle in 1987. She was executed with a sawed-off shotgun three days after she was spotted in a Queens grand jury waiting room.

In 1995, a witness in a drug case who had declined protection was found in a shallow grave beside the Cross Island Parkway with her fingertips and teeth removed.

The Brooklyn district attorney's office itself lost another witness in 2000, federal prosecutors say. In that case, a 32-year-old Jamaican immigrant is facing federal charges in the slaying of a witness to an attempted murder.

Witness killings, then, are far from unknown to prosecutors. New York State's 1995 death-penalty law made it first-degree murder to kill a person to prevent testimony.

The federal government, of course, has spent millions of dollars over the years developing its witness protection programs, whose popular image, fed by Hollywood, is of a new life in a sunny climate.

The reality for witnesses in New York is more bleak. The city's district attorneys sometimes have provided witnesses with new identities, and have helped them find jobs in different parts of the country. But such relocations, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, are rare.

For city witnesses — and hundreds report being threatened every year — a short stay in a gloomy hotel, or a moving van to another borough and a month's rent, is the common experience, prosecutors say.

Before an indictment is handed up, witness protection is handled by the police. But then the burden shifts to prosecutors.

When the district attorneys' offices do protect witnesses, the substantial costs of relocation are, it turns out, generally paid out of a catch-all allocation that covers all sorts of basic office needs, including rent, postage, telephone bills and photocopying.

Prosecutors say they do not allow cost to control decisions about witness safety. But they acknowledge that resources are scarce, and so they are often forced to ask terrorized witnesses whether moving in with relatives is an option.

"We are very close to having a situation where you're soon not going to be able to do something because you are not going to have the money," said David W. Lehr, the chief assistant district attorney on Staten Island.

Data provided by the district attorney show that in Brooklyn, more than 200 people annually reported threats in recent years. During that time, though, the amount of money spent on witness protection in Brooklyn declined sharply.

The office spent about $242,000 to relocate and protect 90 families last year, down from more than $727,000 in 1998, for the protection of 108 families. A spokesman for the office said the savings were due to efficiencies, like cutting the length of hotel stays.

Several years ago, Sean M. Byrne, executive director of the New York Prosecutors Training Institute, proposed to the Legislature that it restore the modest money it had provided in the 1980's for statewide coordination of witness protection programs, which vary widely and, in some counties, do not exist at all. The proposal died.

The Witness List Is Read

On June 27 of last year, a Thursday, the case of the killing of Doughboy Brown was on the docket. Opening statements would be Monday. The assistant district attorney who had been assigned to the case the day before, Stephen Murphy, was seated at the scuffed prosecutor's table in Justice Abraham Gerges's courtroom. Wesley Sykes and Michael Warren were at the defense table.

The potential jurors were assembled.

Justice Gerges read the witness list.

State Supreme Court in Brooklyn is a vast concrete box near Borough Hall. Even in a time of lowered crime rates, the volume of cases is numbing. Last year, the Brooklyn district attorney brought to a close 4,267 felony proceedings and 144 homicide cases.

In the relentless mix, the unusually bloody or strange killing will sometimes draw a crowd. But mundane murders, assaults and robberies come in an endless wave that draws little notice. The courtroom players sometimes seem barely able to keep track of the rushed negotiations and confusing calendar calls. It can take hours just to find defendants within the building. Victims run into their attackers in the halls.

On that day, the case of the killing of Doughboy drew no particular note. Justice Gerges read the names of the police officers who had gone to the schoolyard, a doctor who had treated Doughboy. Then he read the names that meant something on the blacktop behind P.S. 23. Corey McCullough. The three teenage girls. Corey Brown.

And Bobby Kareem Gibson.

Justice Gerges would later note, in a formal opinion that authorized Bobby Gibson's grand jury testimony to be read into the trial record, that he saw Turf in the courtroom that day. And Justice Gerges made clear he thought Wesley Sykes and Turf were behind Bobby Gibson's death.

"After the disclosure of the witnesses' names," Justice Gerges wrote, "a number of courtroom visits between defendant and his family, including Turf, were permitted." The judge noted that the police said that Turf was a leader of the violent Bloods gang.

"The court," Justice Gerges continued, "observed defendant and Turf in conversation a number of times."

`To Lay Slay and K'

Maybe it was reckless. That Friday night, so close to the trial, Bobby Gibson went back to his old neighborhood again. By then, he had heard that of the five witnesses who had identified Wesley Sykes, three — the teenage girls — had been bribed and threatened. That left him and Corey Brown.

Maybe he was frightened, as his mother says. Maybe he was brave, making a declaration that he would not be forced off the streets where he had grown up. Maybe it was just that he could not resist being with his friends on a summer night.

Bobby spent the night drinking, part of it at a nearby bar. For most of the night, a group of people sat drinking near the stoop of 276 Throop Avenue, an apartment house near the corner of Willoughby where several of the schoolyard regulars lived.

In the group was another youth, Trevis Ragsdale, a slight 18-year-old with close-cropped hair and jagged teeth. Trevis was a close friend of Corey McCullough, the ego-injured boyfriend who had taken Wesley Sykes into the playground nearly 10 months before.

In the dark that Saturday morning, according to prosecutors, Trevis Ragsdale was sitting on a stoop with a witness they have yet to identify. A police car was stopped at the corner. "As soon as that police car leaves I'm going to lay Slay and K," he said to the witness, according to the prosecutors. Slay and K had played him, he said, according to the witness.

In the language of the street, the prosecutors say, "lay" meant "kill." "Slay" was Corey Brown. "K" was Kareem, Bobby Gibson. Trevis Ragsdale, prosecutors say, intended to silence the last two witnesses who could damage Wesley Sykes.

The prosecutors have never explained their theory of why Trevis Ragsdale was recruited, but they have never wavered from their belief that he was intent on preventing Bobby Gibson from testifying.

Sometime after 4 a.m., Corey Brown said, Bobby was at last heading home to Crown Heights. He passed the stoop at 276 Throop. It was a block away from the schoolyard where Doughboy had been killed.

Corey was down the block, out of range.

Bobby Gibson was shot in the back. A bullet pierced his spleen, liver and heart. He died at 5:14 a.m., a little more than 51 hours before he was due in court.

Bobby was laid out at the James H. Willie Funeral Home on Franklin Avenue. When they heard what had happened, the three teenage girls testified, they had no doubts.

"Kareem didn't take the money," Mookie said, "and I felt that's why he got killed."

Flight and Fear

The Monday morning after Bobby Gibson was killed, Turf was in the Brooklyn courtroom where Wesley Sykes's trial was about to get under way. Prosecutors say he was not seen again until months later, when he was arrested in Virginia and returned to Brooklyn. He was indicted on a murder charge in the 1999 slaying and, separately, on charges of tampering with and bribing the three teenage witnesses in the killing of Doughboy Brown. He is in jail awaiting trial.

Through his lawyer, Stacey Richman, Turf denied that he had had anything to do with Bobby's killing. He asserted that he had not sought out the witnesses and denied any criminal activity. He has not been charged in the killing of Bobby Gibson. But prosecutors say they are still investigating.

Two weeks after Bobby Gibson was killed, Wesley Sykes was convicted of killing Doughboy. He was sentenced to 28 years to life. He is appealing. At his sentencing, he said he had had nothing to do with the murder. "I feel sorry for the young guy, Dennis Brown, whoever he is," he said.

After Bobby Gibson died, Trevis Ragsdale fled to North Carolina, but was eventually taken into custody and charged with murder, accused of killing Bobby Gibson to prevent him from testifying.

Trevis Ragsdale had told investigators that he was drunk when he shot Bobby Gibson, and that he had meant only to scare him. His lawyer, Paul Lieberman, says those statements were manipulated by detectives, and that his client is close to mentally retarded. He said Trevis Ragsdale was unaware Bobby Gibson was a witness in a murder trial. A hearing in Trevis Ragsdale's case is scheduled for July 21. He remains in jail.

This May, after a reporter asked whether the police had ignored warnings about threats to witnesses in the schoolyard case, Inspector Michael Gabriel, the officer in charge of detectives in Brooklyn North, suggested that the police and the prosecutors were divided over the case.

He said the police had concluded that the killing of Bobby Gibson did not appear connected to the murder in the schoolyard. "In hindsight it doesn't seem that it was related," Inspector Gabriel said, though he said he could not rule out the possibility.

Such a police statement undermining a murder indictment is extraordinary. Some prosecutors said the police might prefer not to have the killing of Bobby Gibson seen as the murder of a witness because of the questions that might raise.

After Bobby Gibson was killed, prosecutors provided protection for 27 people, moving many of them out of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Many remain in a netherworld of dislocation, living in hotels or new apartments elsewhere in the metropolitan area. Corey Brown, who lives outside the city, said he never walks the streets alone. Answering questions through the prosecutors, one of the teenage girls, Quanna, said hers is a life of looking over her shoulder. "We don't know who Turf has out there," she said.

In court recently, Trevis Ragsdale's lawyer asked for information, like the names of prosecution witnesses, in order to prepare for Mr. Ragsdale's trial.

The prosecutor, Kyle C. Reeves, told the judge that he would not turn over the names of witnesses until the last possible moment. He had witnesses, he said, "who are terrified because one of their own friends was murdered because he was a witness."

The Solo Beyoncé: She's No Ashanti

The Solo Beyoncé: She's No Ashanti
By KELEFA SANNEH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/arts/music/06SANN.html

A FEW years ago, Beyoncé made her declaration of independence: "All the women who independent, throw your hands up at me." The song was called "Independent Women Part I," and it was an anthem of self-reliance sung by Destiny's Child, a feisty pop republic made up of three women.

But they weren't equally independent: everyone knew that Beyoncé didn't need the others. That was the not-so-subtle message of "Survivor," the title track from the third and most recent Destiny's Child album. Beyoncé taunted her former bandmates (two original members had left, and so had one of their replacements) while warning the current ones that they, too, were expendable: "You thought I wouldn't sell without you, sold 9 million." That pronoun — "I" — is as specific as the sales figure.

If Beyoncé has a mirror-image rival, it's Ashanti. You might call her a dependent woman, though that's not an insult. She made her name by telling gruff rappers how much she loved them, singing stylized duets with Fat Joe and Ja Rule. She was, we were constantly reminded, the first lady (or, more often, "princess") of the Murder Inc. record label, and everywhere she went, some guy was shadowing her, shouting the label's catch phrase: "It's murder!"

Ashanti's self-titled debut album, released last year, was a huge hit, thanks largely to a song called "Foolish," on which she pledged loyalty to a man who didn't deserve it: "I keep on running back to you." This was the antithesis of Destiny's Child's dogma: Ashanti sang like a woman who just couldn't help herself.

Both singers have new albums: Beyoncé, 21, just released her inevitable solo debut, "Dangerously in Love" (Columbia), and Ashanti, 22, just released her follow-up, "Chapter II" (Murder Inc./Island Def Jam). Each singer says her new album is a step forward, an evolution, a triumph — that's what singers always say. But only one of them is right.

Even at its lewdest, Destiny's Child always had a knack for sanitizing the sleazy world of R & B. The group's 1997 debut single, "No, No, No," had seductive lyrics, but the singers sang it like a nursery rhyme: "You be saying no, no, no, no, no/ When it's really yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah."

Most of the time, though, it didn't really matter what the words were. By 1999, they had perfected a style — close harmonies, quick delivery — that made it difficult to pay attention to the words. "Say My Name," which helped revolutionize R & B with tricky rhythms and nimble vocals, stands as one of the great pop songs of the last decade, but singing along is nearly impossible.

R & B singers are supposed to be warriors in the battle of the sexes, but Destiny's Child stayed above the fray, keeping suitors at arm's length with a series of mild rebuffs. Despite the title, "Bootylicious" was more of a go-away than a come-on: "I don't think you're ready for this jelly/ My body's too bootylicious for you, babe," they sang, and the chorus left no room for argument.

Then, having worked so hard to make herself seem unattainable, Beyoncé changed course. Over the last year or so, she has often been spotted with Jay-Z, and while she's been careful to avoid confirming or denying rumors that the two are a couple, she hasn't exactly quieted speculation by recording a series of duets with him; one of them, "Crazy in Love," is the lead single from her new album.

"Crazy in Love" is the best song on "Dangerously in Love" (the album is, oddly enough, named after an old Destiny's Child song); it's a simple, irresistible combination of triumphant horns and a wicked hip-hop beat. But the song also hints at what's wrong with the album: its vision of romance is profoundly unconvincing.

If Jay-Z and Beyoncé really are a couple, that might explain why their collaborations sound so tepid. When he teamed up with Mya for "Best of Me Pt. II," Jay-Z spat out one clever, rude pick-up line after another ("That's high-school, making me chase you 'round for months/ Have an affair, act like an adult for once"), and on Missy Elliott's "One Minute Man (Remix)," he quoted "Independent Women Part I" while explaining the rules of a one-night stand. When he records with Beyoncé, though, Jay-Z's mischievous wit disappears; on "Crazy in Love," he barely even makes reference to her.

For her part, Beyoncé explains how "Your love's got me looking so crazy right now," but her vocals — as deft and accurate as ever — convey none of the giddy rush that the lyrics describe. Near the end, when she trills, "You're making a fool of me," she sounds decidedly unfoolish, as Ashanti once put it.

The first half of "Dangerously in Love" has some impressive moments — Beyoncé arpeggiates her way up and down the scale whereas most of her contemporaries merely slide, and it's fun to hear her mimic the pizzicato line in "Naughty Girl." But it's not much fun to hear her try to sing like a "naughty girl," and by the time the album's ballad-heavy second half arrives, you may start hoping that the other two Destiny's Children will show up to set things right.

They don't, and it's not just their harmonies that are missed; it's the girl-group exuberance. Together, the three might have found an amusing way to flirt with Jay-Z, or Sean Paul, or Big Boi, from OutKast. Without them, Beyoncé hedges her bets, retreating to the safety of torch songs, like the creepy bonus track "Daddy," where she croons, "I want my unborn son to be like my daddy/ I want my husband to be like my daddy."

Maybe this album is merely a misstep, and maybe Beyoncé has yet to record the brilliant solo album that people expected. Or maybe it's proof that she isn't quite as versatile as she seemed. She's a strong and independent singer, no doubt, but maybe she seems strongest and most independent when she's got a posse behind her.

By contrast, Ashanti's new album doesn't arrive bearing the burden of high expectations. Because of her gentle, breathy vocal style, she's been dismissed as a lightweight; when she was nominated for a Soul Train award last year, tens of thousands of people signed an online petition of protest.

This should be a terrible time for Ashanti. Her label, Murder Inc., is under investigation for alleged ties to drug dealers. And these days, her former duet partner Ja Rule is keeping a low profile — still licking his wounds, perhaps, after losing a vicious war of words with 50 Cent. Barely a year removed from her successful debut, she is already an underdog.

But Ashanti's greatest asset has always been her blitheness. Groomed for stardom ever since she was a kid, she treated Murder Inc. as if it were her own personal Mickey Mouse Club; if she felt out of place, she never showed it. And so she floats through her new album as if nothing's amiss, never pausing to wonder whatever happened to Ja Rule, who's conspicuously absent.

The lead single is "Rock Wit U (Awww Baby)," and it shows off everything that's right about the album — it's the kind of song that drifts into your head before you even realize you were listening to it. The lyric sheet reproduces every "awww" and every "baby"; the words form a pattern on the page that mirrors the song's hypnotic appeal.

Nearly every song on "Chapter II" is this appealing, and although the beats are diverse — "I Found Lovin' " resurrects the squiggly sound of 1980's pop, and "The Story of 2" is a swinging piano ballad — Ashanti's approach never changes. The singing is restrained, the lyrics are simple (there are virtually no three-syllable words), and the attitude is breezy.

There are hardly any guests on this album, but Ashanti does fine without them — in fact, her sweet nothings sound even better when they're not interrupted by the salty nothings of rappers. "Chapter II" isn't perfect, but once you edit out the skits (which are, without exception, excruciating), you're left with an album that's graceful, beguiling and above all, light, in the best sense of the word.

There's more than one way to declare independence, after all, and whereas Beyoncé announced hers with a brassy single, Ashanti tucks a similar spirit into every not-quite-heartbroken lyric. She's not trying to convince us she's crazy in love. On the contrary, she dismisses old boyfriends (and, perhaps, duet partners) with the same noncommittal sigh she uses to welcome new ones, and this unflappability suggests a kind of strength. In her own willowy way, she's a survivor, too.

Palestinian Factions Aiming to Control Outcome of Truce

Palestinian Factions Aiming to Control Outcome of Truce
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/international/middleeast/01ASSE.html

GAZA, June 30 — The agreement by the three main Palestinian factions to suspend attacks on Israelis is based on bad faith — and that may give it a fragile chance of success.

The truce, which was announced Sunday, came about because of new international pressure after the war in Iraq. But its roots are deeper than that, in the complex politics of Palestinian violence, which fed the 33-month-old uprising against Israel and now might, haltingly, be bringing it to a close.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, has set a trap for Hamas and other militant groups. He is hoping to whipsaw any relative calm resulting from a cease-fire to extract concessions from Israel, like the opening of military checkpoints inside Gaza today.

Then he wants to use the political support he hopes will follow to comply with the international peace plan known as the road map, collecting weapons and punishing whoever violates the truce, his advisers say. He has made no secret that his goal is to turn Hamas into just another political party, stopping it from conducting in effect its own foreign policy toward Israel.

Hamas leaders see the trap clearly. That is why they called for Mr. Abbas's resignation earlier this month, after he urged an end to the armed uprising against Israel.

Hamas leaders are gambling that the cease-fire will fail and with it, Mr. Abbas and the American-led peace plan, say Palestinian officials who have negotiated with them. Hamas hopes Mr. Abbas's own trap will close over him, the conflict will resume and a negotiated solution will seem more hopeless than ever.

As the cease-fire negotiations ripened last week, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, acknowledged in an interview that bad faith was a key. "Everybody is bargaining with a very different set of expectations," he said. "Maybe Hamas didn't want to go into a situation against its interests, but they bet that Israel will not follow through."

The question is why Hamas feels it must play along with the governing Palestinian Authority even for a short time. There are two sets of motivations cited by Palestinian officials and militant leaders. One arises from external considerations and the other, subtler one, from intensely factionalized Palestinian politics.

The American defeat of Saddam Hussein played a central role, as Hamas sponsors in Syria and Iran came under new American pressure and Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia's, moved to calm the region. "After Sept. 11, the Palestinian resistance lost its international support," said Samir al-Mashharawi, a top official here of Mr. Abbas's mainstream Fatah faction. "After the Iraq war, the Palestinian resistance lost its Arab support."

Other motives stem from Palestinian politics. In the view of Mr. Abbas's allies and other Fatah officials, Fatah's initial leadership of the intifada, or uprising, legitimized Hamas violence. After the uprising began in September 2000, those officials noted, it was months before Hamas began playing a high-profile role. Now, with Fatah pursuing a truce, Hamas had little choice but to play along.

"Having Fatah involved made the conflict a national conflict," said Qadoura Fares, a Fatah legislator who negotiated the truce in Damascus, Syria, with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "If Fatah is out, you have two extreme Muslim groups against Israel, against the peace process and against the Palestinian state. They understand these things."

Mr. Abbas is acting now because, along with the Palestinian people, Fatah is in trouble. Once Hamas joined fully in the fighting, Fatah found itself in a new competition for respect in the street.

In the view of some of Mr. Abbas's advisers, the great mistake made then by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was to try to out-Hamas Hamas. That was an impossible proposition for Fatah, given its official acceptance of a two-state solution with Israel.

It is significant that the name chosen for Fatah's violent wing was "Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades." It reflects, in part, the fact that the intifada began after Ariel Sharon, with hundreds of policemen, visited the site of Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem in September 2000. The site is sacred to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

But the name also reflected what some Palestinian officials lament as an Islamicization of Fatah, a secular faction, as it tried to top Hamas.

The name was not enough. Although lacking Hamas's fundamentalist visions of paradise, Al Aksa Martyrs added suicide to its arsenal. With Hamas gaining popularity, the group began in January 2002 to conduct suicide bombings and shootings against Israelis, after Israel killed a popular local leader of the group.

Unlike Hamas, which felt bound by religious injunctions, Al Aksa Martyrs felt free to use women as suicide bombers. Further, like Hamas, the group began striking frequently across the so-called Green Line, the boundary of the West Bank.

Those attacks helped persuade Israelis that Fatah, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, was bent on erasing Israel, not just on attaining a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war.

The increasingly anarchic violence bolstered Fatah's popularity.

But in March 2002, as Palestinian violence reached a peak in what seemed daily attacks, Palestinian security officials learned that Israel was preparing a broad offensive into the West Bank. Some pleaded with Mr. Arafat to act forcefully to stop the violence, a longtime associate of his said.

He refused, this adviser said, believing that Israel would not take the step. Mr. Arafat preferred not to confront the Islamic groups, preserving his own broad popularity and the option of unleashing violence as a bargaining lever, this adviser and Israeli intelligence officials said.

At the end of March, Israeli troops stormed into the West Bank in their biggest ground offensive since they invaded Lebanon in 1982.

Over the succeeding year, as Israel began putting whole Palestinian cities under curfew and taking back territory ceded to Palestinian control under the Oslo peace accord, a debate grew inside Fatah over whether the faction had lost control of its youth and its message. Mr. Fares and other 40-something Fatah leaders, who grew up under Israeli occupation rather than living decades in exile as Mr. Arafat did, argued that Fatah needed to reach out again to Israeli moderates. Some Fatah leaders continued to urge attacks but only against soldiers and settlers, to clarify that Fatah was seeking only to throw off occupation.

Mr. Abbas, however, was intent on rebuilding Palestinians' shattered relations with the United States, and he realized that the Bush administration would not accept such distinctions. He sought a total halt, as did the Egyptian government. Mr. Abbas is trying to play to Fatah's relative strength, as the faction that can make gains through negotiation.

In the short term, Mr. Abbas's biggest problem may be Fatah. It was telling that on Sunday, Hamas and Islamic Jihad jointly announced the suspension of violence, while Fatah lagged behind. It lacks their ramrod discipline.

Fatah officials are worried that they may not be able to stop violence by some Aksa Martyrs cells, which Israeli officials say are loosely controlled. Al Aksa claimed responsibility today for the first rupture of the cease-fire, a sniper's killing of a foreign worker in the West Bank.

[Israeli troops shot to death an armed Palestinian who fired a pistol at an army roadblock early Tuesday near the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem, military officials told Agence France-Presse. The man had no immediately known connection to any militant organization.]

Further, Mr. Arafat, like Hamas, may feel threatened by any rising support for Mr. Abbas. It was no coincidence that allies of Mr. Arafat raised last-minute objections to the truce on Sunday, delaying Fatah's announcement and underscoring his pre-eminence.

In the longer term, if the truce holds, the test of that strategy will be whether peace talks undercut the Islamists and strengthen support for a two-state solution.

Hamas has always opposed that solution. But in an interview in April, Ismail Abu Shanab, a leader here of Hamas, said an American-brokered two-state solution could lead to peace — a statement that might, of course, have been mere posturing.

Asked if he would then give up his claim of a "right of return" to his family home outside Ashkelon, in what became Israel in 1948, Mr. Abu Shanab, said, "No." Then he added, "But maybe this will fade down."

"If we have a state," he continued, as his 4-year-old daughter played nearby, "maybe the next generation will see things differently."

In a Momentous Term, Justices Remake the Law, and the Court

In a Momentous Term, Justices Remake the Law, and the Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/national/01SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, June 30 — The Supreme Court term that ended last week will leave as big an imprint as any in recent memory — not only on the country, but on the court itself in ways few could have expected when the term began.

Not only are the justices, whose average age is near 70, now involved in an unanticipated dialogue about the nature of human sexuality, they have displayed a new attentiveness to legal developments in the rest of the world and to the court's role in keeping the United States in step with them.

In an amazing final week, the court preserved affirmative action in university admissions, providing a safe harbor for a policy that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion described not as something to be grudgingly tolerated but as close to a moral imperative. Then the court found in the Constitution's due process guarantee a demand for gay men and lesbians to be accorded dignity and respect for their private sexual behavior.

These rulings followed by several weeks a decision that was in many ways equally surprising, opening states to lawsuits for violations of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist described that law as an appropriate exercise of Congressional power to combat stereotypes about female workers' domestic responsibilities and "thereby dismantle persisting gender-based barriers" facing women in the workplace.

Each of the three cases "addressed a rather new but rather widely supported cultural development and gave it constitutional legitimacy," Professor Paul Gewirtz of Yale Law School said. To some extent the court was leading the country, and to some extent it was playing catch-up, but the most significant aspect of the term, Professor Gewirtz said in an interview, was the court's role in "consolidating cultural developments," legitimizing them and translating them into "binding legal principle."

Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissenting opinion in the gay rights case, accused the court of having "taken sides in the culture war," and there was little dispute that, to some degree, at least, he was right. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas provided much for Justice Scalia to regret, not least its embrace of the right-to-privacy line of cases that began with a birth control decision in 1965 and culminated 30 years ago in the abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

And Justice Kennedy's citation of a 1981 gay rights opinion by the European Court of Human Rights, the first time a decision of that court has been invoked by a majority of the Supreme Court, marked a stinging defeat for Justice Scalia, who has tried to hold back the court's steadily growing interest in foreign legal developments. Justice Scalia criticized the majority's use of that decision, which Justice Kennedy cited as evidence of a Western consensus on sexual privacy, as "meaningless" and "dangerous," saying the court should not impose foreign views on American constitutional law.

The voting patterns this term gave Justice Scalia ample cause for disaffection. Thirty of 71 cases decided by published opinions were unanimous, leaving 41 contested cases. In these, Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas were the court's most frequent dissenters, with 16 and 21 dissenting votes respectively. This was a change from recent terms, when Justice John Paul Stevens, the court's most liberal member, was consistently the most frequent dissenter.

Justice Stevens dissented 15 times this term, as did Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The fewest dissenting votes, as usual, were cast by Justice O'Connor, with eight, followed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, with nine — making the indisputably conservative chief justice appear almost a centrist in the court's current spectrum.

In fact, "this term suggested a split between two kinds of conservative Republicans," Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general and longtime student of the court, said in an interview. Justices Kennedy and O'Connor "share the sensibilities of corporate Republicans, who often have a bit of a libertarian streak in them," he said, while on social issues, "Scalia and Thomas represent the Moral Majority strain, which is vocal but not necessarily dominant."

Chief Justice Rehnquist, Mr. Dellinger said, often occupies a middle position between the two groups.

The voting record in the court's most closely divided cases demonstrates Justice O'Connor's pivotal role. There were 14 cases decided by 5-to-4 votes, accounting for 20 percent, compared with 28 percent last year. In the 2000-1 term, the fractious year of the Bush v. Gore election decision, fully one-third of the court's cases were decided, as that one was, on 5-to-4 votes.

Justice O'Connor was in the majority this term in all but 2 of the 14 5-to-4 decisions. In five of those, including two that upheld California's three-strikes sentencing law, she cast her vote with her more conservative colleagues. In four others, including the Michigan law school case and a case that preserved a nationwide program that provides money for legal services for the poor, she voted with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

That leaves five of the 5-to-4 decisions that fit no particular pattern. That is an unusually high proportion for the members of this court, who have now served together for nine years, a modern record. "Maybe the stability is leading them to act more like individuals and less as blocs," said Richard Lazarus, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and faculty director of its Supreme Court Institute. "To the extent that's true, the conservatives lose, because they are the ones with the potential to win through bloc voting."

It is a court that in recent years has displayed a notable institutional self-confidence, striking down federal statutes at near-record rates. That pace slowed this term, but the muscles the justices have been exercising were put to use in both the affirmative action and the gay rights decisions. The outcome in neither case was particularly surprising. It was the breadth of the majority decisions that was startling.

But those rulings, like many Supreme Court decisions, are part of an ongoing constitutional conversation that involves the court, the various branches and levels of government, and the public. In the gay rights case, "the court has initiated a dialogue with the country," said Prof. Robert Post of the University of California's law school at Berkeley. "Now the court will probably wait to see what the country says back."

The 2002-3 term, which began Oct. 7 and ended June 26, was notable for what it did not include as well as for what it did. All speculation and preparation to the contrary, there were no retirements.

These were the term's major rulings. The court's Web site, www.supremecourtus.gov, provides the full text of all decisions.

Equality

In striking down criminal sodomy laws in a case from Texas, the court issued a stunning declaration of constitutional liberty for gay men and lesbians. While the political, social and legal ramifications of the 6-to-3 decision may take years to play out, there was no doubt that Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, was a constitutional watershed.

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, overturning the court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and declaring that gays are "entitled to respect for their private lives" as a matter of constitutional due process, was joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Justice O'Connor concurred separately in an opinion based on the guarantee of equal protection. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented.

The court preserved affirmative action in university admissions, upholding by a 5-to-4 vote the "holistic" and "individualized" approach used by the University of Michigan Law School. Justice O'Connor's majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, found that the program, both in its operation and in its diversity rationale, comported with the controlling opinion by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in the Bakke case 25 years ago. The majority expressed the expectation that affirmative action would no longer be needed 25 years from now. Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented, along with Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas.

The University of Michigan's affirmative action program for its undergraduate college was unconstitutional, the court ruled by a 6-to-3 vote, because its awarding of 20 points on a 150-point admissions scale to black, Hispanic and American-Indian applicants was too mechanistic and quota-like. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority in Gratz v. Bollinger, No. 02-516, joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas. Justice Breyer concurred separately. Justices Ginsburg and Souter, who dissented, would have upheld the policy, while the third dissenter, Justice Stevens, said only that he believed the court lacked jurisdiction over the case.

In an important voting rights case, the court endorsed a new approach to racial redistricting, permitting consideration of overall minority influence in the political process, beyond the actual number of minority voters in a particular district. The 5-to-4 decision in a case from Georgia gave ammunition to Democrats who, in alliances between black and white politicians, are trying to "unpack" black voters from districts with black super-majorities in order to give Democrats a better chance of recapturing suburban districts that Republicans drew in the 1990's for the purpose of electing white Republicans.

Justice O'Connor wrote the majority opinion in Georgia v. Ashcroft, No. 02-182, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas. The dissenters agreed with the majority in principle but warned in an opinion by Justice Souter that the majority opinion could prove insufficiently protective of black voting power.

A unanimous decision made it easier for workers to win discrimination suits against employers in cases where race, sex, religion or national origin is one factor among others in a dismissal or other adverse job action. Direct evidence of discrimination is not necessary in these so-called "mixed motive" cases, and circumstantial evidence is sufficient to show that discrimination was a "motivating factor," Justice Thomas wrote for the court in Desert Palace v. Costa, No. 02-679.

Criminal Law

A pair of decisions upheld California's three-strikes law that imposes long sentences for a third offense, even a nonviolent property crime. The defendant in Ewing v. California, No. 01-6978, received 25 years without parole for stealing two golf clubs, while the defendant in Lockyer v. Andrade, No. 01-1127, received 50 years without parole for shoplifting children's videos on two occasions, a total of $150 worth of merchandise. By a 5-to-4 majority in both cases, the court rejected the argument that the sentences were so disproportionate to the crimes as to violate the Eighth Amendment's bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Justice O'Connor wrote the majority opinions. The dissenters were Justices Breyer, Souter, Stevens, and Ginsburg.

In two death penalty cases, a majority expressed concern that the lower federal courts were not monitoring with sufficient vigilance the quality of justice being meted out by state courts. By a vote of 8 to 1, with Justice Thomas dissenting, the court ordered the federal appeals court to grant a habeas corpus hearing to a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, who said the selection of his jury had been infected by racial bias. Writing for the court in Miller-El v. Cockrell, No. 01-7662, Justice Kennedy said that in order to qualify for a hearing, an inmate needed to present only a plausible case and not, at that preliminary stage, a winning one.

In the second case, the court ruled that a federal appeals court should have granted a writ of habeas corpus to a Maryland death row inmate, Kevin Wiggins, on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel. The 7-to-2 majority overturned the death sentence on the ground that the defense lawyers' failure to investigate and inform the jury of the childhood abuse Mr. Wiggins suffered fell below the minimum constitutional standards of competence. Justice O'Connor wrote the majority opinion in Wiggins v. Smith, No. 02-311. Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented.

The court placed strict limits on the government's ability to force mentally ill defendants to accept medication in order to become competent to stand trial. Under the court's new guidelines, forcible antipsychotic medication for a mentally ill defendant accused of a nonviolent crime — in this case, a dentist, Dr. Charles T. Sell, charged with Medicaid and mail fraud — "may be rare," Justice Breyer wrote for the 6-to-3 majority in Sell v. United States, No. 02-5664. Justices Scalia, O'Connor and Thomas dissented.

The court rejected two constitutional challenges to the Megan's Law sex offender notification and registration statutes that all 50 states have enacted in the last decade.

In one case, the court held by a vote of 9 to 0 that Connecticut did not need to provide offenders with individual hearings before posting their photographs and information on its Internet registry. A federal appeals court had ruled that the offenders had a due process right to hearings at which they could try to show that they did not present a threat to the community. But Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the court in Connecticut v. Doe, No. 01-1231, that rather than predicting dangerousness, the registry simply listed offenders and their conviction records and did not raise a due process issue.

The court also ruled 6 to 3 that Alaska's application of its Megan's Law to those whose convictions for sex crimes predated the law's passage did not violate the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto legislation. The Ex Post Facto Clause bars retroactive punishments, but Megan's Laws impose not punishment but a "civil, nonpunitive regime," Justice Kennedy wrote for the court in Smith v. Doe, No. 01-729. The dissenters were Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer.

The court addressed the ex post facto prohibition in a second case, ruling that the government cannot retroactively apply a newly extended statute of limitations to those for whom the original statute — and any prospect of legal liability — had already expired. The 5-to-4 decision, Stogner v. California, No. 01-1757, limited a California law that sought to revive liability for long-ago sex crimes and could have nationwide impact on child molestation cases. Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion and Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented.

The court voted 9 to 0 to uphold restrictions imposed by the Michigan prison system on the right of inmates to receive visits from family members and acquaintances. An inmate who commits two violations of the prison's drug or alcohol rules loses all family visiting privileges for at least two years. Justice Kennedy wrote for the court in Overton v. Bazzetta, No. 02-94, that the restrictions were rationally related to prison administration needs.

In a unanimous interpretation of a federal law that makes it a crime for a convicted felon to own a gun, the court held that federal judges do not have authority to restore the right to gun ownership. Congress had stripped that authority from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms after finding abuses 11 years ago, and the question in United States v. Bean, No. 01-704, was whether sympathetic judges could do an end run around the ban by granting relief themselves. Justice Thomas wrote the opinion.

The court overturned a federal racketeering judgment against a coalition of anti-abortion groups that conducted a campaign of disrupting and blockading abortion clinics in the 1980's. The National Organization for Women and two abortion clinics had brought a successful suit for damages and an injunction based on the Hobbs Act, which outlaws obstructing commerce "by robbery or extortion."

But by an 8-to-1 vote, the court said that while the protesters' behavior might well have amounted to coercion, which the Hobbs Act does not cover, it did not fit the legal definition of extortion, which requires actually obtaining another's property by force or threat. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the court in Scheidler v. National Organization for Women, No. 01-1118, while Justice Stevens dissented.

Federal Authority

In an unexpected turn in the court's federalism revolution, the court ruled that states can be sued for violating their employees' federally guaranteed right to take time off for family emergencies. With an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, the court voted 6 to 3 to reject Nevada's claim of constitutional immunity from suit under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The dissenters in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, No. 01-1368, were Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas.

The court upheld the mandatory detention provisions of a 1996 immigration law, ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 that the government can imprison immigrants it is seeking to deport without first giving them a chance to show that they present neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. The case, Demore v. Kim, No. 01-1491, did not deal with terrorism but rather with a category of lawful permanent residents convicted of drug offenses and other "aggravated" offenses. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas.

The court overturned a California law that required insurance companies doing business in the state to produce the names of policyholders who bought coverage from the insurers' Europe-based parent companies between 1920 and 1945. The law was intended to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants receive payment on the policies.

The 5-to-4 decision in American Insurance Association v. Garamendi, No. 02-722, held that the state law conflicted with the federal government's authority to conduct foreign policy. The government has been encouraging negotiation rather than litigation to resolve the Holocaust-era insurance problem. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy and Breyer.

Business

In a significant term for business cases, the most important decision for many businesses was probably one that placed new limits on punitive damages. On a 6-to-3 vote, the court overturned the $145 million in punitive damages awarded by a Utah jury against the State Farm insurance company, which had exposed a policyholder to personal liability by initially refusing to settle a claim in an automobile accident case.

The jury also awarded $1 million in compensatory damages. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, finding the 145:1 ratio "irrational and arbitrary," set new guidelines for punitive damages: neither a defendant's wealth nor its conduct outside the state's borders should ordinarily be considered, and there should be only a small ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages, perhaps as low as 1:1. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Ginsburg dissented in State Farm v. Campbell, No. 01-1289.

It was also an important term for intellectual property. The court upheld the 20-year extension that Congress granted in 1998 to all existing copyrights, ruling 7 to 2 that while the Copyright Term Extension Act might not be good public policy, it came within Congress's explicit constitutional authority. The 7-to-2 decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft, No. 01-618, with a majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg, was a major victory for Hollywood studios and other big corporate copyright holders. Justices Stevens and Breyer dissented.

A trademark dispute between the Victoria's Secret retail empire and Victor's Little Secret, a Kentucky shop selling sex toys, produced the court's first interpretation of a new law intended to protect famous brand names from copycat uses that dilute their impact in the marketplace. The court ruled unanimously that while the famous trademark owner does not have to show actual economic damage in order to win a case under the Federal Trademark Dilution Act, it does have to prove some form of current harm, such as a blurring of a distinctive identity. Justice Stevens wrote the opinion in Mosely v. V Secret Catalogue Inc., No. 01-1015.

A ruling on managed health care unanimously upheld Kentucky's "any willing provider" law that requires managed care plans to accept any qualified doctor who wants to be a participating provider. About half the states have such laws, which the court in Kentucky Association of Health Plans v. Miller, No. 00-1471, found were not pre-empted by the federal law that regulates employer benefit plans.

In another health care case, the court gave qualified approval to Maine's innovative effort to reduce prescription drug prices for uninsured state residents. The 6-to-3 decision lifted an injunction against the Maine Rx program, under which the state assumes the role of a pharmacy benefits manager and presses drug manufacturers to grant price rebates. In a splintered set of opinions, Justice Stevens wrote for the court on most aspects of the issue in Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America v. Walsh, No. 01-188. Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, along with Chief Justice Rehnquist, filed a partial dissent.

In a decision at the intersection of bankruptcy and telecommunications law, the court ruled 8 to 1 that the Federal Communications Commission had improperly canceled the valuable wireless communications licenses that a bankrupt company had won at auction and then could not pay for. It was a huge victory for a startup company, NextWave Telecom, which got back the licenses for which it had initially agreed to pay $4.74 billion before defaulting after an initial $500 million downpayment.

The decision, Federal Communications Commission v. NextWave Personal Communications Inc., No. 01-653, held that the company should have been given a chance to work out a new payment schedule under federal bankruptcy protection. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion and Justice Breyer dissented.

In a decision on employers' liability for damages for workers' exposure to asbestos, the court ruled 5 to 4 that some workers who have developed asbestos-related but noncancerous disease can recover damages based on their "genuine and serious" fear of eventually developing cancer.

The decision, Norfolk & Western Railway Co. v. Ayers, No. 01-963, was a disappointment to a broad swath of businesses that had expected to enlist the court in addressing the asbestos liability issue. In an unusual alignment, Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Stevens, Scalia, Souter, and Thomas. Justice Kennedy dissented, joined by Justices O'Connor and Breyer and by Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Free Speech

The justices decided five First Amendment cases and — unusually for this speech-protective court — rejected the constitutional claim in all five.

By a vote of 6 to 3, the court upheld the Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires public libraries to install antipornography filters on all computers providing Internet access, as a condition of receiving federal subsidies and grants. Librarians may unblock certain sites at the request of adult patrons, but because the law had been blocked from taking effect, it is unclear how it will work in practice. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a plurality opinion for himself and Justices O'Connor, Thomas and Scalia, while Justices Kennedy and Breyer concurred on narrower grounds. Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg dissented in United States v. American Library Association, No. 02-361.

In striking down a Virginia cross-burning statute, the court ruled that states may make it a crime to burn a cross as long as the law clearly gives prosecutors the burden of proving that the act was intended as a threat and not as a form of symbolic expression. The First Amendment permits the government to single out cross-burning as a "particularly virulent form of intimidation," Justice O'Connor wrote for the court in Virginia v. Black, No. 01-1107. The dissenters, Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Kennedy, objected that the decision permitted the state to single out one especially potent symbol for criminal treatment.

In a campaign finance case, the court upheld the longstanding ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates in federal elections. The 7-to-2 majority refused to create an exception permitting unlimited contributions by corporations organized for the purpose of ideological advocacy. While the ruling was not directly related to the major new campaign finance law, the constitutionality of which will be argued before the court in a special session on Sept. 8, some of the new law's supporters were encouraged by the decision in Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont, No. 02-403. Justice Souter wrote the majority opinion while Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented.

The court rejected a telemarketer's First Amendment challenge to a state consumer-fraud prosecution, ruling unanimously that charitable solicitations that include deliberate misrepresentations about what proportion of the money raised will actually go to the charity can be prosecuted as fraud. But wrongdoing cannot be inferred from the bare fact of high fund-raising costs, Justice Ginsburg said for the court in Illinois v. Telemarketing Associates, Inc., No. 01-1806.

The court ruled unanimously that a policy limiting access to a public housing project in Richmond, Va., was not unconstitutional on its face just because it had the potential for chilling free speech on the premises by nonresidents. Justice Scalia wrote for the court in Virginia v. Hicks, No. 02-371, that someone whose speech was actually restricted by the policy could challenge it in a subsequent lawsuit.

Finally, an important commercial speech case fizzled unexpectedly on the final day of the term when the court dismissed Nike's appeal in a California case imposing potential liability on the company for supposed misstatements in support of its overseas employment practices. The fact that the suit against Nike had not yet gone to trial evidently persuaded the court that the case, Nike v. Kasky, No. 02-575, was not yet appropriate for decision. Justices Breyer, O'Connor, and Kennedy dissented from the dismissal.

Property Rights

The court upheld a nationwide program that channels millions of dollars every year to legal services for the poor by pooling the interest earned on short-term deposits that lawyers hold in trust for their clients. Every state has a local version of the Interest on Lawyers' Trust Accounts program, known as Iolta, long a target of a conservative legal group here, the Washington Legal Foundation, which argued that the program amounted to an unconstitutional "taking" of clients' private property. The 5-to-4 decision found there was no taking because individual clients could not earn net interest on such small short-term deposits. Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion in Brown v. Legal Foundation of Washington, No. 02-1325. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented.

Korea's Golden Unwedding

Korea's Golden Unwedding
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/opinion/03SAFI.html

WASHINGTON -- On July 27, the free, prosperous people of South Korea and the oppressed, starving people of North Korea will celebrate the 50th anniversary of armistice.

Some truce. The Northern Communist dictatorship looks southward with hatred born of envy; the democracy of South Korea looks across the 38th parallel in fear of a regime that sees its survival only in building nukes and missiles to blackmail the world.

This week, David Sanger of The New York Times revealed exclusively a C.I.A. belief that at a nuclear testing site known as Youngdoktong the North is developing nuclear warheads small enough to be placed atop its already advanced missiles. Say what you like about our satellite surveillance, but this estimate was treated with great seriousness by the North's vulnerable neighbors.

Yesterday, officials from three of those neighbors — China, Japan and South Korea — were in Washington to work out a way to stop the North from becoming a nuclear missile Wal-Mart for terrorists. Their presence may show progress in the Bush go-it-together approach, instead of acceding to the North's divide-and-conquer demand that the U.S. alone negotiate another fruitless payoff.

Bush's refusal to be suckered as Clinton was has led to some harsh words: Pyongyang warns that any U.S.-led economic sanctions would cause it to "nullify" the 1953 cease-fire, a nice golden anniversary present. As the U.S. enlists world support for our Proliferation Security Initiative — including the interdiction of North Korean ships carrying destructive contraband — Pyongyang escalates with a threat of "merciless" retaliation.

But the quiet move that produced the first sign of the North's willingness to stretch bi- to multi- — a touch-fingertips meeting with the U.S. last month under Beijing's auspices — came after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of redeploying the vulnerable 37,000 U.S. troops now along the North-South border. Moving them south or to Japan would take them out of range of the North's artillery, freeing our Air Force, in a worst case, to take out its nuclear and missile facilities.

It needn't come to that. The key to achieving a peaceful resolution through multilateral negotiation is China, the North's oil and food lifeline. Wang Yi, 49, China's vice foreign minister, is here for these oh-so-informal talks.

He is surely aware of the danger to China's strategic interests of a nuclear North Korea. A pre-emptive strike ending the threat would assert American dominance in Asia. Even if Bush blinked, a nuclear North would cause an antimissile defense to be built, with U.S. help, in Japan, followed by a Japanese nuclear deterrent (not to mention similar defense in Taiwan). That would end China's military dominance in East Asia — a disaster for the untested new leader, Hu Jintao.

But the Chinese pride themselves on diplomatic subtlety and may delay putting the economic squeeze on their Communist ally until it's too late. Besides, cutting off food and fuel invites a flood of North Korean refugees into China.

Therefore, in addition to our resolute, strictly multilateral, no-payoff-to-blackmail approach — which seems to be slowly working — we should suggest that all parties raise their eyes to a larger goal.

Whatever became of the ideal of the reunification of the Korean peninsula? Koreans are, after all, one people, united in their interest in China and distaste for Japan, divided only by an outdated ideological conflict. After a half-century apart, Germans reunited — why not Koreans? The dream is often expressed on both sides.

The problem is this: the Northern leaders are willing provided they dominate, and the South is waiting for the Northern dictatorship to collapse as deprivation deepens. But the free South won't buy dictatorship and isn't too eager to take up the economic burden, while the always-collapsing North won't finally collapse for years, maybe decades.

A face-saver all around, especially for the nervous North and for the conflicted Chinese, would be to treat the coming multilateral talks about a non-nuclear Korean peninsula as the first stage in a national reunification process. Hungry refugees should be repatriated by China to South Korea, which should accept them.

As big thinkers say, the best way to solve an intractable problem is to enlarge it. In the land of negotiation, context is king.

Analysts See Tension Among China's Leaders

Analysts See Tension Among China's Leaders
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/international/asia/01CHIN.html

BEIJING, June 29 — A conflict between supporters of President Hu Jintao and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, has exposed the tensions within China's top leadership and made it harder for a new generation of officials to put their stamp on politics, party officials, journalists and analysts here say.

Mr. Jiang, who is 76, has retained enormous political muscle by keeping allies in key positions and staying on as chairman of the Central Military Commission despite handing his main portfolios to Mr. Hu over the past eight months.

Officials of the Communist Party and scholars who track leadership affairs report growing tensions between him and supporters of Mr. Hu, the 60-year-old president and party leader, who has solidified his stature — among reformers, at least — with his strong handling of the SARS outbreak after initial failings.

The tensions have made it harder for Mr. Hu to navigate between unusually blunt calls for political change from liberal intellectuals and fears of instability expressed by people considered close to Mr. Jiang, the party officials and analysts say.

Supporters of Mr. Jiang, the former party chief and president, may also resent that Mr. Hu has moved to take control of the agenda early in his tenure. Mr. Hu may have crossed a sensitive political line when he dismissed people handpicked for their jobs by Mr. Jiang, the officials and analysts say.

Mr. Jiang seemed to challenge one of Mr. Hu's most important decisions in late May when he invited Zhang Wenkang, the former health minister who was fired for mishandling SARS, to a private meeting in Beijing, several party officials said.

The meeting, which was not publicized, rattled some supporters of Mr. Hu who felt that Mr. Zhang had correctly been held responsible for lying about the spread of SARS in March and early April.

Editors and journalists say officials considered loyal to Mr. Jiang have sought to reverse a trend toward openness in the government-controlled press and restricted coverage of sensitive topics, including SARS and a corruption scandal in Mr. Jiang's power base of Shanghai.

Mr. Hu is cautious in public and deferential — even obsequious — to Mr. Jiang. But some analysts say he quietly asserted himself behind the scenes when he convened a meeting of the party's ruling Politburo to discuss changes to the Chinese military after the Iraq war. Mr. Jiang no longer has a seat on the Politburo and is seen as reluctant to have that body actively overseeing the armed forces.

The sensitivity of the jockeying was intensified when four party elders wrote to Mr. Jiang and the party's central leadership urging that Mr. Jiang resign as military chief to allow Mr. Hu to consolidate power.

The letter, described by two party officials with ties to the four retired leaders, may have had the effect of redoubling efforts by Mr. Jiang and his supporters to keep Mr. Hu in check, those people said.

"People's hopes are riding on Hu, especially after SARS," said a senior editor of an important party newspaper who has followed the political volatility. "But Jiang is still more powerful, and the conflict between them is becoming more evident."

Struggles for political advantage can be exaggerated in China. Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu are regarded as masters of the party's political machinery who dislike direct confrontation. To date they have not openly disagreed on anything.

Indeed, the official New China News Agency has taken the unusual step of announcing that the first major speech Mr. Hu will deliver as party general secretary on Tuesday, the 82nd anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's founding, will focus on carrying out the theory of the Three Represents.

The theory, formulated by Mr. Jiang, is notably vague. But it has been used to demonstrate that the party now speaks for a wider spectrum of people in modern China, including private business executives.

Analysts are speculating about whether Mr. Hu will use the occasion to lay out any new theories or practices. But most agree that as one editor put it, "He won't do anything to offend old Jiang."

Yet party members and government officials often have loyalty to the individuals to whom they owe their jobs, and during transitions the competition among those subgroups — like those loyal to Mr. Jiang and to Mr. Hu — can be pointed.

With China undergoing its most extensive leadership change since the death of Mao in 1976, it remains possible that jockeying for power can delay policy making or even destabilize the government.

One area that appears unusually unstable is control of the official media, on which central leaders rely to set the political tone nationwide.

Mr. Hu and another member of the Politburo's powerful standing committee, Li Changchun, have supported plans to de-emphasize the media's traditional focus on the routine meetings and speeches of top leaders and provide greater leeway for reporting on economic, social and health issues.

The new leadership team has also spoken about allowing more foreign investment in the media and reducing the number of outlets directly supported by the party.

But another important official, Liu Yunshan, the director of the party's Propaganda Department and a close ally of Mr. Jiang, favors keeping tighter controls. Journalists and editors said Mr. Liu had warned top editors at a recent meeting that foreign enemies of China were exploiting divisive topics to undermine the government, citing recent remarks by Mr. Jiang to that effect.

Mr. Liu has led a campaign to restrict coverage of sensitive issues. At least two newspapers have been shut down at least temporarily. Influential magazines including Sanlian, Caijing, News Week and Strategy & Management have been censured or threatened with closing for exceeding the limits of official tolerance.

One subject that has now been largely banned is the ongoing investigation into a scandal surrounding the rise of a Shanghai tycoon named Zhou Zhengyi, who built a property empire on government bank loans during the 1990's.

During that decade Mr. Jiang and his closest supporters steered government support to Shanghai on a large scale. Mr. Jiang is viewed as wanting to keep the investigation of Mr. Zhou low-profile so it does not impugn high-ranking officials like Huang Ju, the former Shanghai party chief who is now a member of the Politburo standing committee.

In April Mr. Zhang, a military doctor who had been picked as health minister by Mr. Jiang, became a prominent symbol of Mr. Hu's willingness to hold officials accountable for mistakes. Few people questioned that Mr. Zhang had covered up the spread of SARS, contributing to its rapid spread and forcing an embarrassing about-face for party leaders.

In inviting Mr. Zhang to meet with him, Mr. Jiang signaled that he intended to defend his supporters and that he disapproved of Mr. Hu's handling of SARS, party officials said.

His intervention would appear to explain the erratic way that Gao Qiang, a deputy health minister who became the main spokesman for SARS policy, described the political fallout of the disease during separate televised news conferences.

In mid-April, Mr. Gao announced the dismissal of Mr. Zhang and another senior official and condemned their mistakes. Then in late May, shortly after Mr. Jiang was said to have met with Mr. Zhang, Mr. Gao reversed himself and strongly defended Mr. Zhang. At a third news conference in mid-June, Mr. Gao reverted to his original line, saying Mr. Zhang had made serious errors that justified his firing.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Faces Calls to Step Down

Hong Kong Chief Executive Faces Calls to Step Down
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/international/asia/08HONG.html

HONG KONG, July 7 — The chief executive, after the defection of a key legislative ally, today faced calls for his resignation and for greater democracy as he was forced to defer a vote on the internal security legislation that has been his top priority.

Tung Chee-hwa made clear at a news conference this afternoon that he had not given up, saying he still believed that the Basic Law, the closest thing Hong Kong has to a constitution, required the government to pass a security bill. But Mr. Tung said that his top priority would now be the economy, and that he would try to address all the concerns raised by an estimated 500,000 demonstrators at a pro-democracy march on July 1, and not just the complaints about the security legislation.

Some marchers were upset about Hong Kong's record unemployment of 8.3 percent and falling housing prices. But most of the banners and placards they carried criticized the security legislation or Mr. Tung.

How Beijing will react to the postponement of legislation it supported, and whether the struggle will bring greater democracy in Hong Kong, remain to be seen.

The most ardent pro-democracy party, the Frontier, said today that it would continue a campaign, begun last Friday, for Mr. Tung's resignation. Leaders of both pro-government parties distanced themselves from him today.

But the main opposition party, the Democratic Party, did not call for Mr. Tung's departure, having concluded that Beijing might appoint a more politically adroit successor, who could push through the proposed new laws banning sedition, subversion, secession and treason.

Audrey Eu, an independent lawmaker who tends to side with the Democratic Party, said her main concern was changing the system by which chief executives and members of the Legislative Council are chosen. Mr. Tung was re-elected last year to a second five-year term by a 794-member Election Commission dominated by businesspeople and officials with close ties to Beijing. He ran unopposed because no one dared antagonize the Chinese Communist Party.

"If we keep to the present system, which is no system at all, we're likely to get another Mr. Tung or someone even worse than Mr. Tung," Ms. Eu said.

Mr. Tung postponed his efforts to pass the security legislation after James Tien, the chairman of the pro-government Liberal Party, resigned from Mr. Tung's cabinet and said his party could not support Mr. Tung's demands for immediate consideration of the bill.

The party's defection, together with those of several political independents, gave pro-democracy parties the votes they would have needed to postpone consideration of the security bill when the Legislative Council meets next Wednesday.

"We have to take into consideration that there were close to half a million people who protested peacefully," Mr. Tien said this afternoon, while resigning his cabinet post.

The Basic Law vaguely calls for Hong Kong to become more democratic in time for the next election of a chief executive, in 2007. Mr. Tung has shown no interest in pursuing this, however. Emily Lau, the leader of the Frontier party, said removing Mr. Tung was the best way to pursue more democracy. "If he's going to be removed, that will add huge impetus to the push for democratic reform," she said.

Whether Mr. Tung actually steps down is likely to depend on who holds sway in Beijing — conservatives or more moderate officials inclined to accept more democratic change — said Sing Ming, a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong. "Ultimately, it depends mainly on Beijing," he said. "It's anybody's guess."

After publicly backing Mr. Tung's effort over the weekend to force quick passage of the bill, Beijing officials were silent today on developments in Hong Kong.

Ma Lik, the secretary general of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, better known as the D.A.B. and the most pro-Beijing and pro-government party here, called today for Mr. Tung to reshuffle his cabinet, focus on economic issues and put aside the security legislation for more than a year. Such a lengthy postponement would push the issue past the next round of elections for the Legislative Council.

Financial analysts and economists here had warned that passage of the legislation might have a chilling effect on their ability to write and speak candidly about the prospects of the Chinese economy and Chinese companies, which would undermine faith in Hong Kong's markets. Today, news of the postponement produced a rally on Hong Kong's stock exchange. The Hang Seng Index rose 255.59 points, or 2.65 percent, to close at 9,892.40.

Arbitrators Say Vivendi Owes Messier Millions

Arbitrators Say Vivendi Owes Messier Millions
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/business/media/01VIVE.html

Jean-Marie Messier has always been desperate to be treated like an American business titan. Now he has been.

Mr. Messier, the ousted French chief executive of Vivendi Universal, won a ruling yesterday from a three-member arbitration panel in New York forcing his former employer to pay him the $23.4 million in severance that he said he had been granted before his departure last year.

For Mr. Messier, who engineered the transformation of Vivendi from a water utility into a global media conglomerate that nearly went bankrupt, the severance ruling may finally put him in the group he sought to join as he eschewed France's business establishment in an effort to become an American capitalist.

Indeed, Mr. Messier, 46, was a near-facsimile of many American chief executives now out of work: He lived in a $17.5 million apartment on Park Avenue, flew around the world in a fleet of private jets and spoke of "synergies" and "convergence" with zeal.

His $34 billion acquisition of Seagram and its Universal music and film businesses in 2000 was his attempt to become a media mogul. He wanted to build a global media empire that rivaled the likes of AOL Time Warner and Walt Disney. The severance agreement may put Vivendi in league with Disney: it, too, paid what many saw as an outsized severance package — $100 million — to Michael Ovitz, its former president. It is now being sued by shareholders for that decision.

Still, Mr. Messier's severance package is particularly notable because he had derided such packages in his autobiography. "These special payments — the golden parachutes that we hear so much about — cannot be justified for executive directors. My contract has no such clause. I promise my board never to negotiate one," he wrote in his book "J6M.com: Who's Afraid of the New Economy?" in 2000. The title referred to his nickname, which, in French, stands for "Jean-Marie Messier, myself, master of the world."

Vivendi, which is now dismantling much of Mr. Messier's creation by auctioning off its United States entertainment assets, said it "intends to challenge this decision through all available legal actions, both in France and in the United States." It said the company's board planned to discuss its options today as it also reviews the progress of its auction.

Vivendi contended that its board never voted to approve Mr. Messier's severance package. According to an account in the coming book "The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal" (Portfolio), Mr. Messier coerced Edgar Bronfman Jr. and other board members to sign off on the severance package.

"His attitude was, `Unless I get my money, I'm not going to call a board meeting,' " the book says Mr. Bronfman said of Mr. Messier. "It was blackmail, and any agreement negotiated under duress would, of course, not be valid. But it was my duty to agree."

Mr. Bronfman declined to comment yesterday, but his spokesman said he did not dispute his remarks in the book.

Mr. Messier's lawyer, Michael J. Malone, said in a statement: "Any appeal of this well-reasoned, unanimous decision by three of the leading arbitrators in the U.S. would be frivolous. If Vivendi nevertheless prefers to prolong these proceedings by pursuing such an appeal, we are quite confident Mr. Messier will prevail in that forum, as well."

It is unclear what legal recourse Vivendi might have to a binding arbitration ruling.

Mr. Messier was the second-highest-paid executive in France last year, with a package valued at 5.6 million euros ($6.4 million), behind Lindsay Owen-Jones, the chief executive of L'Oréal, the shampoo and beauty products group, who was paid 6.3 million euros. Their salaries helped make France the top payer of chief executives in Europe, according to the European Corporate Governance Institute in Brussels.

Healthy American companies rarely balk at paying severance terms outlined in contracts with ousted chief executives. One exception was Linda Wachner, the former chief executive of the Warnaco Group. After her dismissal, Ms. Warnaco demanded $25.1 million in severance, but eventually settled for a package of stock and cash that the company said was worth just $452,000.

Sleeves in His Heart, Thread in His Veins

Sleeves in His Heart, Thread in His Veins
By TRACIE ROZHON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/business/01CALV.html

If all politics is local, fashion industry politics is almost claustrophobic. So when Phillips-Van Heusen was looking for people to design and shepherd its Calvin Klein women's department-store line into the Seventh Avenue spotlight, it picked a team headed by a quintessential Garment District insider, third generation.

Andrew Grossman, 44, the son of a suit maker and grandson of a pocket maker, is chief executive of the "front of the curtain" team chosen by Phillips's chief as part of the Calvin Klein licensing deal announced last week — a deal that retailing executives have called unprecedented.

When Phillips-Van Heusen bought Calvin Klein early this year, it announced that it would be handling the new Calvin Klein men's collection itself but would be looking for a licensee to produce the new women's sportswear collection. Two weeks ago, it announced its choice: Phillips-Van Heusen had arranged a marriage of two competing groups, Kellwood and Mr. Grossman's company, G.A.V., to handle the not-yet-named Klein women's line that is set to arrive in department stores next spring.

While Kellwood alone has been granted the license — potentially worth $40 million to $50 million a year, people involved in the license talks say — Mr. Grossman and his partner, Alexander Vreeland (G.A.V. stands for Grossman and Vreeland), will be paid for design, marketing and some sourcing — finding factories to do the work. Kellwood, one of the world's largest clothing makers, will take care of additional sourcing, production and distribution.

The matching of Kellwood and G.A.V. is a bit like that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: he gave her class; she gave him sex appeal. But in this case, the giant, somewhat staid Kellwood gave G.A.V. a large, well-respected distribution network and a big-wallet name. Mr. Grossman and Mr. Vreeland, both in their 40's and with extensive experience in high-end retailing, gave Kellwood fashion savvy and panache.

Spring 2004 is now regarded as a make-or-break season for some of the nation's biggest fashion companies. "This spring is turning into a lottery," Mr. Grossman said. "Anybody who grabs the brass ring and becomes the dominant player in the women's better-clothing category could keep the lead for years."

The new Calvin Klein line will compete with Lauren/Ralph Lauren better women's line, and with clothes produced by Liz Claiborne, Jones Apparel and, significantly, the department stores' private labels, which are increasing in number and sales volume. The so-called better line of clothes are sold almost exclusively in midlevel department stores like Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom and Macy's. (The higher-priced "bridge" lines are more often seen in fancier department stores like Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.)

In recent years, the better lines have been faltering more than have other women's lines as the department stores themselves have run into trouble. While Lauren/Ralph Lauren had been gobbling most of its competition, the line hit a plateau about a year ago, said Michael Gould, chief executive of Bloomingdale's. Peter Boneparth, chief executive at the Jones Apparel Group, has said that the line is "mature" — an assertion vigorously denied by the president of Polo Ralph Lauren, Roger N. Farah.

In early June, Jones Apparel unexpectedly threw the license to produce the Lauren clothes back to Polo Ralph Lauren, which has vowed to produce the clothes for spring 2004 itself and has hired two executives to manage their introduction. Last year, Polo sold $548 million of Lauren/Ralph Lauren clothes. Bruce J. Klatsky, chief executive of Phillips, has predicted that the new Calvin Klein better women's line will eventually bring in $1 billion in retail sales. Jones, too, with the loss of Lauren/Ralph Lauren, has vowed to create its own competing line, priced 15 to 25 percent less.

It promises to be a real shoot-out.

Yesterday, Mr. Grossman said his team, under the leadership of Kellwood, was gearing up to produce Calvin Klein's classic minimalism, with what they say will be excellent tailoring and bargain prices.

Those outside the machinations of Seventh Avenue might assume that Mr. Klein himself would design the clothes. But increasingly, he has receded into the background, as far as designing is concerned. When Phillips bought Calvin Klein, Mr. Klatsky said the designer would not have design control, but would act as a consultant. The Kellwood-G.A.V. partnership was dreamed up by Mr. Klatsky himself and blessed by Mr. Klein, whom — no matter what the contract says — Mr. Klatsky wanted to make comfortable.

"You have to understand: Calvin is a living designer acting as a front man," an executive involved in the deal explained. "You don't want to make him unhappy — otherwise you might as well send him home."

So everybody is happy at Phillips-Van Heusen — at least for now. "The deal was handed to me on a silver platter," Hal J. Upbin, Kellwood's chief executive, said in an interview last week.

While Mr. Vreeland will handle the very visible sales and marketing sides of the line, Mr. Grossman will stay behind the scenes, as usual. Yet this week, clothing executives and bankers who know both men said Mr. Grossman is the one who lives and breathes the clothing business, with a reputation as one of the smartest men on Fashion Avenue.

"Andy does have wholesaling in his blood," Mr. Upbin said. "He knows every angle of the business."

Andrew Grossman grew up — where else? — in the Bronx, the home borough of Mr. Lauren, Mr. Klein and, he said, "everybody who is anybody in fashion." His father is Herbert Grossman, who retired two years ago from his own business. Herbert Grossman Enterprises sold suits that cost $400 to $750. His grandmother, Frances Grossman Lapidus, made pockets for a jacket company in Brooklyn. And his sister-in-law, Mindy Grossman, is a global vice president for apparel at Nike.

In 1977, after two years at American University, the younger Mr. Grossman asked his father for a job. Turned down, he walked across the street and got a job with Plush Bottom jeans — "when bell-bottoms were out to here," he explained.

Two weeks later, realizing that Andrew was serious about quitting college, Herbert Grossman rescued his son from bell-bottoms, and introduced him to the chief executive of Evan Picone, then one of the biggest names in ready-to-wear apparel. Mr. Grossman ultimately married the boss's daughter, Bonnie Spitalnick; their marriage ended in the early 90's.

He hopscotched through apparel companies in the late 70's and 80's, ending up as national sales manager for the Ralph Lauren women's business, then licensed by Bidermann Industries USA.

When he joined the company, Polo's women's sales were $8 million, Mr. Grossman recalled. When he left in 1982, he said, they were $92 million. The nation had discovered the Polo polo shirt, in 26 colors. The shirts, draped next to one another like towels on a six-foot rack, set a pattern followed by the Gap, J. Crew and stores like the Limited. Mr. Grossman explained that he was not the eye that arranged the shirts; he was the executive who programmed the deliveries and invented the systems to replenish the stock.

He left to help his father start his own suit company, then went to Williwear, a youth-oriented clothing company named for the designer Willi Smith, which was popular in the 1980's. He started to travel — at least once a month to India, where Williewear had its clothes made. Before long, he got a call from the Jones Apparel Group, asking him to run its Norma Kamali division. There, he met Sidney Kimmel, still the chairman of Jones. Eventually, Mr. Grossman became president of Jones Apparel, and later, chief operating officer at Georgio Armani, a job he held until 2000.

Marvin S. Traub, former head of Bloomingdale's and now chairman of Financo Global Consulting, recalls meeting Mr. Grossman when he worked at Jones. "I remember how closely he worked in Italy, buying the best silks in the best mills at end-of-season prices," Mr. Traub said. "I also remember his passion for apparel in general."

The multimillion-dollar deal that brought Mr. Grossman into the Phillips-Van Heusen fold began through industry contacts. "Vreeland was friends with Klatsky," Mr. Grossman said. "I had had several conversations with Upbin — the head of Kellwood — when we were thinking of merging Chaus into Kellwood, so we had a relationship. So we had a meeting, and we hit it off." Bernard Chaus is an apparel company still run by its co-founder, Josephine Chaus.

Mr. Vreeland and Mr. Grossman, backed by Jay L. Schottenstein, chairman of American Eagle Outfitters, had wanted to bid on Kasper ASL, with its enticing, potentially valuable Anne Klein brand.

They thought big. "We wanted to buy Anne Klein and Kasper, and wouldn't it be great to add Calvin to the mix — what a company that would be!"

But it wasn't to be. Mr. Klatsky and Mark Weber, his partner, wanted G.A.V. to focus more on the Calvin line. As it was, Calvin Klein was not G.A.V.'s only interest: Mr. Grossman and Mr. Vreeland have just snagged the license for Emanuel by Emanuel Ungaro as well. Not bad for a brand-new company, just formed in March.

What Mr. Grossman wants to do with the Calvin Klein line is to create a wardrobe in the sleek, minimalist, perfectly crafted tradition of Mr. Klein's runway fashions and his Madison Avenue emporium — with the prices of a more middle-class department store shopper. He claims to have all the factories lined up to make the samples and sew the clothes. That is not an easy thing, with Ralph and Jones and Liz and everybody trying to get things made for the all-important spring 2004.

"We're through the first process of the designs," Mr. Grossman said this week. "The colors and the concepts have been approved. We are now fabricating and styling." The chief designer for G.A.V. is Mr. Grossman's second wife, Robin Howe. She had been the chief designer at Jones and was restricted the last two years by a noncompete clause in her contract, which has now expired. The G.A.V. team brainstormed and, within minutes of getting the contract from Kellwood, was passing around swatches.

"He didn't wait — he came out of the chute running," Mr. Upbin said of Mr. Grossman this week. "He was prepared, and he took his shot."

Seventh Avenue is waiting.

Free Spirits in Their Fortress, the Law at the Gate

Free Spirits in Their Fortress, the Law at the Gate
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/international/europe/01DENM.html

COPENHAGEN — Ever since a group of squatters took over an abandoned military fortress in the heart of this intimate, orderly city 32 years ago, their "Free Town," Christiania, has caused the government untold heartburn.

What began as a social experiment in communal living now draws hundreds of thousands of tourists. Hashish is sold freely on Pusher Street and smoked openly, despite the Danish law forbidding both activities. Houses built mostly without official permission are not bought and sold, but loaned to kindred spirits selected by other residents. There are no roads, and thus no cars.

By next summer, Parliament is expected to vote on a final redevelopment plan for Christiania, which is technically under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense and happens to sit on 80 acres of prime waterfront real estate.

Problems are solved in-house; residents meet, and meet, until they reach consensus, whether on sanitation or schooling. If violence breaks out, the threat of baseball bats does the job. The police are called in only as a last resort.

"Here in Christiania, we are very honest and very law obeying," said Karsten Malmos, 43, a strapping man who lives in Christiania with his wife and two young children. "We only don't obey the law when it's a stupid law."

Such talk does not sit well with the Conservative Party, the majority party which took power in 2001 on a law-and-order platform and vows to rid Copenhagen of Christiania. Of the many threats to Christiania over the years — the Danish supreme court declared the place illegal in 1978 — none has been delivered with such gusto and taken with such seriousness.

By next summer, Parliament is expected to vote on a final redevelopment plan for Christiania, which is technically under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense and happens to sit on 80 acres of prime waterfront real estate. If adopted, the plan would change Christiania gradually, leaving some illegal houses alone and knocking down others, building roads and leaving no trace of Pusher Street, whose hash stalls are the biggest thorns in the eyes of the Conservatives.

On Pusher Street, only two rules are enforced: no hard drugs and no photographs. The dealers are free to sell, mostly because the police seldom walk into Christiania for fear of being pelted by rocks and bottles. When they do venture in, they come with 100 officers in riot gear and equipped with tear gas. There have been no raids at all this year despite police suspicions that the hash trade is controlled by organized crime.

"Selling hash is against the law," said Helge Adam Moller, a Conservative member of Parliament and head of its defense committee. "If it were going on any other place, even in my own town square, it would take one and a half minutes for the police to be there. And here it is happening one and a half kilometers from the Royal Palace. You can sell it and nothing happens. It is unacceptable."

Christiania's residents beg to disagree, and have decided — after countless meetings — to shed their socialist ideals and embrace one of capitalism's most powerful weapons: the lawyer.

These residents of Christiania, which houses 750 adults and 200 children, even agree that the place was once too wild and violent, with too many hard drugs, too many ramshackle houses and too many freeloaders. But that, they say, has now changed, making the government's crackdown all the more distasteful and senseless.

In some ways, there is even less freedom in Christiania than in Denmark proper. With 14 neighborhood groups, and a consensus decree needed for every decision, Christiania sometimes seems like an out-of-control condo association.

"There are rules about everything, about changing the windows of a building, about everything," said a man named Wanda ("only Wanda," he said), who is the director of the kindergarten and has been in Christiania since the "glory days" of 1971. "Sometimes it's just too much."

Peter Post, a Christiania elder, sits in his den, overlooking a picture-perfect canal surrounded by wildflowers and ducks. "We talk and talk and talk and talk," he said. "If you can't reach consensus, you have another meeting and another meeting and another meeting."

Christianians have built a village, fueled by tourist dollars, that they seldom need to leave: there are day-care centers and a kindergarten for the children, a health center, a small food market, a hardware store, a cinema and countless restaurants, bars and music venues.

After years of debate, residents decided not to start their own elementary school. Or, more accurately, they could not agree on how best to run the school, so children go outside to do their book learning. But inside, the children enjoy an old-fashioned sense of freedom: neighbors know them and no cars threaten them in this tranquil urban oasis.

Over the years, as the government pushed them to clean up, the residents created an infrastructure. Today, everyone has electricity and water, and they pay for it. They haul away their own trash. They pay the government a ground tax. They even built and paid for a new bridge. Instead of rent, each Christianian adult pays $155 a month to a common box for necessities.

As even one government official acknowledged, asking not to be identified: "It's getting like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They are having pizzas and looking at TV. They are no longer smoking grass, singing and painting their bodies."

But the residents still draw the line at what they call basic principles: the hash — which they argue is less harmful than alcohol — stays, along with most of the houses they have built.

"They claimed that it was too rough and dirty before," Mr. Malmos said. "But now that it's becoming so nice, they are envious, I think."

Wanda agrees. Yes, the meetings are dreadful, and partying can get raucous. "But," he said, "when I feel depressed, I take bus No. 2 to a boring square in town and stand in the middle and look around and say: `Good heavens. Thank the Lord, I'm not living here.' "

Blogs in the Workplace

Blogs in the Workplace
By WILLIAM O'SHEA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/technology/07NECO.html

For Nicholas Tang, the deluge of work-related e-mail messages became overwhelming. "It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes more than a thousand," said Mr. Tang, director of operations at Community Connect, a company in New York that operates AsianAvenue.com and other online communities with an ethnic focus.

For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log.

Web logs, or blogs as they are known, are a type of frequently updated online journal, often featuring excerpts from news articles and links to other blogs. So far, Web logs are best known as a medium for communicating with the general public — like the blog by the noted journalist Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), which is devoted to culture and politics, and sites like the Veg Blog (www.vegblog.org), which is about all things vegetarian. In the corporate context, some chief executives, for better or worse, have adopted blogs as a way to share their personal wisdom with the wider world.

But a growing number of businesses, government organizations and educational institutions are using Web logs to manage and improve the flow of information among employees. These blogs, not accessible to the public, typically allow many people to contribute entries that can be read by others in the organization.

It may be too soon to tell whether the corporate blog will emerge as a genuinely useful tool for business communications or simply another way for bores and blowhards to blather. But a growing circle of adopters, like Mr. Tang, swear by their blogs.

At Community Connect, Mr. Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks like fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages.

"When I want to know something I check the Web log," Mr. Tang said. "It saves me the trouble of e-mailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update."

Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The various people at the company who spoke to each candidate posted their comments on a password-protected Web log.

"One person wrote that a candidate was `quiet,' " Mr. Tang recalled. "There was a whole discussion about this. `What does that mean? Is it a bad thing? Does it mean he's antisocial?' There was more back and forth with the interview process. It helped everyone to get on the same page more quickly."

Because of their informal nature, blogs can lead to digressions. Shirley Palma, a Community Connect systems administrator, said that after meeting one job candidate, a woman posted this message on the interview blog: "I think he's so cute! I want to take him home!"

Ms. Palma noted that "it was in a motherly way; she didn't mean anything by it." But the remark prompted a male colleague to blog back, "I think if I said that it would be considered sexual harassment."

The cute candidate ended up getting the job, having been praised by others on the blog for being easygoing and an apparently fast learner. "We interviewed lots of candidates," Ms. Palma explained. "Can you imagine remembering 10 people after the fact? The blog helped keep track of everyone."

Google, the provider of Internet search services, has become a big user of blogs for communication among its employees and managers — a result of the company's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the creator of the Blogger Web log service, earlier this year. On one internal blog, called Google Love Notes, the customer service staff posts thank-you notes from users. One is from a woman who nursed her sick dog back to health after researching the illness on Google; the posting includes a photograph of the healed dog frolicking in a stream. Another came from a woman who was able to find a long-lost love through Google — and who happily reports that she wound up agreeing to marry the man's brother.

"It's a good pick-me-up," Jason Shellen, a Blogger manager at Google, said of Love Notes.

Less relevant to the corporate mission was a posting on a blog operated by Notiva, a Silicon Valley software company, by a staff software designer who posted photographs from his vacation to France. Another employee posted the official rules for foosball.

But Tim Dawson, Notiva's director of system architecture, says he does not mind if people have fun with the blogs, because he sees how valuable the medium can be for sharing information about software bugs and fixes. "We went from 11 people to 50, and that all happened in the space of 15 months," Mr. Dawson said. With the blogs, he said, new employees "can come in and see what's out there."

The telephone and wireless giant Verizon Communications uses a Web log to collect news and intelligence about the industry and competitors. "We used to spend lots of time e-mailing articles around but not keeping track of them," said Sean Byrnes, the lead architect on Verizon's project for Wi-Fi wireless Internet access. His group now consolidates such information in a series of topic-specific blogs.

But opening a pipeline to comments from employees can produce a torrent of information, essentially defeating the purpose of the tool. "You reach information glut very quickly," Mr. Byrnes said.

And the free flow of information does not necessarily promote communication, says David Jarvis, an analyst at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. The center is running an experimental program using Web logs to explore how naval technologies can be applied to homeland defense. The blogs are meant to disseminate news, project updates and new ideas.

"People are going to the blogs every day as a source for news," Mr. Jarvis said. But, he added, "I am disappointed in the tool," because the hoped-for exchange of ideas among departments has not spontaneously developed. "You need specific goals," Mr. Jarvis said.

Typically, though, such experiments are not expensive to mount. LiveJournal's blogging service costs companies $25 a year. Corporate editions of Manila, a Web log program produced by Userland Software, costs $899 a server computer, but one server can accommodate hundreds of people. TeamPage, a corporate Web log program offered by Traction Software, begins at $10,000 a server, but small-group versions cost much less.

As business interest in Web logs grows, more companies are moving into the market — or expanding into it, in the case of software developers that had focused on personal Web log tools but are now aiming at teams and organizations. One such company, Six Apart, plans to begin selling its corporate product in the next few weeks. And 20six, a British company, plans to introduce blog software for teams in the fall.

Time will reveal how many Web log software companies the market can support. But corporate blog enthusiasts like Mr. Tang, of Community Connect, are convinced that the medium is here to stay.

"People are starting to use Web logs to archive data that would have otherwise been lost," Mr. Tang said. He noted that much of the company's internal communications had been via instant messaging — and was lost as soon as the correspondents closed their chat windows. Now, though, employees are starting to post transcripts of relevant discussions on the Web logs, he said.

"It's not just making life more convenient," Mr. Tang said, "but actually giving us something new we didn't have before."

Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide

Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide
By BARNABY J. FEDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/technology/08DIVI.html

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Children who show up this month for basketball camp at the Carl Russell Recreation Center here will find some unexpected drills on their schedule.

Aaron Bailey, the recreation center's director, plans to take advantage of breaks in the hoops action to send the campers to the center's newest addition, a computer room stuffed with 10 refurbished computers, all with high-speed Internet connections. The aim is to help make the youngsters as agile on computers as they are on the courts. "I might even send the campers in before I let them play basketball," Mr. Bailey told a visitor recently.

Mr. Bailey's center is being linked to 35 other sites around Winston-Salem — recreation centers, churches in the city's poorest neighborhoods, libraries, schools and a homeless shelter — in the first phase of WinstonNet, one of the most advanced and broadest efforts yet by public and private groups in an American city to bridge the so-called digital divide between the haves and have-nots.

For years, community activists and politicians around the country have talked about the need to help people who have been left behind in the digital revolution because of poverty, disabilities or fear of new technology. Without computer literacy, the argument goes, disadvantaged groups will become more excluded in the high-tech economy. Yet many efforts have meant little more than making it possible for people to surf the Web from a library terminal.

WinstonNet — which is based on a fiber optic ring that surrounds the city center and links to Internet 2, the newest, highest-capacity piece of the Internet — goes beyond providing free access to computers for those who do not own them.

It will allow any resident with a library card to have an e-mail account; transact business with the city, like payment of parking tickets; and store homework or other documents on a central server so they can be easily retrieved from any site on the network.

Documents can be stored in a private file, in a file available to a limited number of other users or in a file open to the public. Parents can gain access to school assignments and communicate with teachers by calling up Learning Village, a software program donated by the I.B.M. Foundation.

Perhaps most important, the plan focuses on giving first-time users plenty of computer training. Instructors at the WinstonNet site in the basement of the Union Baptist Church, for instance, helped teenagers from a nearby housing project learn to use computers in creating business plans for their own summer businesses.

"The digital divide problem has been defined mainly in terms of access, but it needs to be defined more broadly as a matter of skill," said Karen Mossberger, an associate professor of political science at Kent State University in Ohio.

As a bonus, the training process can also open the door to mentoring disadvantaged youngsters.

Winston-Salem officials say WinstonNet, in addition to doing social good, can be an economic catalyst for the city, best known as the home of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. The city is struggling to reduce its dependence on tobacco and manufacturing.

The fiber optic ring will provide a broadband communications link for engineering and biotechnology businesses that need to send and receive huge masses of data. Targacept, an RJR spinoff that is developing medical products based on nicotine, is expected to connect to WinstonNet by the end of this year.

Tying so many organizations into the same system will make it easier to train many more users, said Johannes Boehme II, associate dean for academic computing at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who serves as WinstonNet's volunteer president.

"Very few communities do this holistically," Mr. Boehme said.

While that may be true, some social service organizations and communities had digital access programs long before WinstonNet.

Boys and Girls Clubs of America, for example, has used $100 million in software and cash from Microsoft to create more than 1,000 community technology centers around the country where children use computers to do homework and learn skills like designing Web sites.

The Blacksburg Electronic Village, a project of Blacksburg, Va., and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, says it has helped 87 percent of the community's residents and most of its businesses become connected to the Internet, with more than 60 percent receiving low-cost high-speed connections from local cable and phone companies.

And Atlanta estimates it has attracted about 15,000 residents, over one-third of them children, in the last two years to 15 community technology centers in poor neighborhoods. That program also includes a mobile computing center in a bus that carries 12 computers with wireless broadband connections to poor neighborhoods, according to William Lindsey, a spokesman for the Mayor's Office of Community Technology.

"We think we are making big strides to eradicate the digital divide," Mr. Lindsey said.

But some experts have their doubts. Dr. Lynette Kvasny of Pennsylvania State University recently published a study that concluded that Atlanta's technology centers and a program in La Grange, Ga., offering free Internet access for subscribers to a city-owned cable television system, did little to improve the lives of the poor. The Atlanta model was criticized by some regular users of the centers for providing inadequate training, Dr. Kvasny said.

Some critics say the digital divide evolves so rapidly as technology advances that big initiatives, especially those driven by government policy, can lock users into obsolete technology.

"It's misguided to look at it as a serious social problem that needs to be dealt with with aggressive subsidies," said Adam D. Thierer, director of telecommunications policies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy group in Washington.

In fact, Mr. Thierer said, computer technology is spreading to underserved segments of society unusually rapidly compared with other innovations. Nearly two-thirds of American homes now have a computer, according to Odyssey, a research firm based in San Francisco.

But the gap between those who are able to use computers effectively and poorer citizens with little exposure may actually be widening, said W. Frank Newton, executive director of the Beaumont Foundation of America, which focuses on digital divide programs.

Government has become less eager to pay to bridge that gap. President Bush has tried to eliminate technology access programs created by the Clinton administration in the Education and Commerce Departments to help communities bridge the digital divide. Just under $50 million of the cuts was restored by Congress in the spring after a lobbying campaign by a coalition of more than 180 groups.

And while a controversial universal service charge on long-distance phone bills, established by Congress in 1996, helps some schools and libraries connect to the Internet, that multibillion-dollar fund cannot be used to finance broader projects like WinstonNet.

State financing for such programs has also been sharply reduced because of budget problems, according to Kavita Singh, executive director of the Community Technology Centers Network in Cambridge, Mass.

WinstonNet began to take shape in flusher times. It grew out of Wake Forest University's drive in the 1990's to make itself a leader in using computers in education. Wake Forest has been giving every student a laptop since 1996. It decided in 1998 to replace the first-generation broadband lines connecting its medical school with the main campus on the other side of the city and a research center downtown, replacing them with the ultimate in broadband, a private fiber optic highway.

That network, later sold to a telecommunications subsidiary of Duke Energy, had enough spare capacity to spur community discussions about who else might use it. Among the groups involved were Forsyth Technical Community College, which trains student volunteers to refurbish donated computers and wire them into the network; Winston-Salem State University, a historically black college that has extensive outreach programs into the city's most depressed neighborhoods; and several local government agencies.

"Turf was removed as an issue at the beginning," said Claudette Weston, who represented the library system in the meetings. "People came to cooperate."

Each WinstonNet host site pays its own operating costs, including monthly fees to local phone or cable service providers for access to WinstonNet's broadband ring. Hosts are also responsible for developing their own filtering policies.

Now there are discussions about allowing individuals to connect to the WinstonNet system through local phone or cable lines, without going to a WinstonNet site. The local Habitat for Humanity group is proposing that all its renovated homes come equipped with WinstonNet access.

"As people become more aware of it, the pressure will mount for more access," predicted Don Martin, superintendent of the Winston-Salem/ Forsyth County Schools. Mr. Martin said one possible WinstonNet expansion would create a site in the sprawling Hanes Mall south of the city. "One thing we've learned is that everyone can find their way to the mall."

A Test of Paying Attention Behind the Wheel

A Test of Paying Attention Behind the Wheel
By JOHN O'NEIL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/health/01ATTE.html

Listening while driving seems to be safe, even if the listening is absorbing much of the driver's attention. But talking while driving, it seems, is a different matter.

A new study, released on Sunday, measured what happened when drivers were sent out into traffic and given a variety of mental tasks to perform. The researchers found that internal distractions — that is, what was going on inside the driver's head — could impair visual skills while driving as much as external distractions, like a baby crying in the back seat. But they also found big differences in the amount of interference caused by different kinds of mental activities.

The study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, was conducted by researchers at the Public Administration for Traffic Safety of Spain and the Complutense University in Madrid. Twelve young adults with good driving records were sent on a four-hour highway trip in a Citroën fitted with a camera that tracked their eye movements to gauge how much attention they were paying to how much of the visual field. The dashboard was also equipped with lights that would turn on periodically; the drivers could turn them off by pressing buttons near the steering wheel.

The researchers divided the mental tasks into two categories: receptive, meaning passively absorbing information, and productive, in which the drivers were asked to give answers to defined requests. The drivers' performance in between these tasks was measured for purposes of comparison.

For the receptive tasks, the drivers listened to two-minute taped messages and were told to pay close attention, as they would be asked about them later. Some of the messages related concrete information, including descriptions of objects, while others concerned more abstract data, like a narrative. The researchers found that this kind of intent listening had almost no effect on how closely the drivers paid attention to the road and the dashboard.

But when the drivers were asked to talk about what they had heard, their ability to pay attention dropped by as much as a third. Even relatively simple production tasks, like relating where they were and what they were doing, had about as big an effect as requests that the researchers considered more complicated.

The study found that the distraction levels were equally high when the driver was talking to a passenger or into a hands-free cellphone.

One of the researchers, Dr. Luis M. Nuñes of the traffic agency, said the findings should not be seen as an endorsement of using hands-free phones while driving. For one thing, he noted, most conversations involve talking as well as listening. For another, he said, the use of cellphones of any kind involves movements that are less likely to be automatic than features that have long been designed for easy access in cars, like turning on radios.

An earlier study by the same researchers found that visual tasks produced high levels of distraction for drivers. Putting the two together suggests that a high-risk activity may be trying to remember the landmark that tells you where to exit for a particular restaurant while telling someone what you had the last time you ate there.

Subject Is U.S., Object Is Art

[we saw barbier's excellent piece at the margulies collection last year in miami.]

Subject Is U.S., Object Is Art
By GRACE GLUECK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/04/arts/design/04GLUE.html

SCENE: the day room of a nursing home as a television set burbles on. Captain America lies on a gurney, attached to an IV. Superman, long in the tooth, stands braced by a walker, its metal legs confining his flowing cape. A wizened Catwoman slumps in an armchair. And an elderly Mr. Fantastic sits glumly at a table, his played-out elastic limbs draped limply over and under it.

This installation of life-size figures offers a take on the United States through its aging comic book heroes, once symbols of might and indestructibility. It may not be the weightiest exhibit in the Whitney Museum's ambitious "American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003" (an uncatchy title, for sure). But the image, by a French artist, Gilles Barbier, is one of the funniest in a stimulating and sometimes shocking show.

The idea on the part of Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney's curator of contemporary art, was to explore the ways that artists throughout the world react to the United States as a superpower (not necessarily post- 9/11). They were chosen from 30 countries (including the United States) on six continents.

The results — a motley display of documentary films, videos, installations, photographs and objects by 47 artists and filmmakers and three collaborative groups — run from sunny side up to deep distrust and despair. Mr. Rinder can be accused of trying to cover too many bases, and the show has weak spots. Still, much of it seems relevant in the lingering aftershock of 9/11.

There are reflections on America's military might, its industrial clout, its treatment of minorities and immigrants, its consumerism, its system of justice, its marketing strategies, its religious evangelism, its celebrity worship, its interference with other governments.

On the other hand, there are more positive expressions of admiration for the freedoms, the opportunities and the material achievements of a country unfettered by ancient traditions.

The overall exhibition ranges from high-tech, interactive installations like a complex Internet game by a Croatian artist, Andreja Kuluncic, to plain old-fashioned objects, like an elaborately decorated vitrine by an American-born Egyptian, Amina Mansour.

But the show's tone is set by an ironic portrait of New York City's 9/11 hero and former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Done by a Chinese artist, Zhou Tiehai, it is titled "Libertas, Dei Te Serventi" (2002). Mr. Zhou uses the glowing Soviet Social Realist style that glorified leaders like Lenin and Stalin.

Beneath his portrait the artist has painted two balls of elephant dung, a comment on Mr. Giuliani's attempts in 1999 to suppress a show at the Brooklyn Museum in which the artist Chris Ofili attached worshipful offerings of elephant dung to a painting of a black Madonna.

Outright anger at the United States and a thirst for revenge are expressed in the Japanese artist Makoto Aida's "Picture of an Air Raid on New York City" (1996), using as a base the folding screen of an earlier tradition. In fake gold leaf, it depicts a formation of World War II Japanese bombers above a Midtown Manhattan in blazing ruins.

Another heated Japanese entry is Hisashi Tenmyouya's "Tattoo Man's Battle" (1996), done in the style of a woodblock print. It presents an almost religious struggle between Japan, portrayed as a puny but fearless and resplendent mounted warrior wielding a glowing sword, and a steroidal sci-fi monster that looms over him, breathing fire and gripping a mighty weapon, an implacable symbol of the United States.

More laid back but still implicitly critical are photographs by a Chinese photographer, Danwen Xing. His large-scale still lifes, so to speak, depict vast dumps of American "e-waste," or computer rubble, shipped to Guangdong Province on China's south coast (the same province said to be the source of the SARS virus).

There impoverished laborers sort and recycle parts, filling local rivers and irrigation canals with the leftover sludge. Meant as a comment on America's Nimby environmental policies, the pictures despite their content have an eye-pleasing formal elegance.

American character and behavior come in for subtle derision in several works, among them the Norwegian artist Jannicke Laker's "No. 17" (1997), a video in which she lures a boyish tourist into an embarrassing display of what she perceives as the naïveté and callowness of Americans.

"Jay's Garden, Malibu," a film projection by Mark Lewis, is one of the show's weaker entries. It follows porn stars in various stages of dress as they cavort in an idyllic garden designed by a noted Los Angeles landscape architect, Jay Griffith. The Canadian artist is presumably commenting on American visions of Utopia as smut heaven.

"The Last Road Trip" (2000), a computer-animated film by a Dutch artist, Arno Coenen, takes the viewer on a satirical, psychedelic tour of urbanized Southern California, touching on American ways of fast food, police surveillance, neon signage and pornography, among other commonplaces.

America's treatment of its minorities and indigenous citizens does not escape censure, although — probably since the artists are from elsewhere — there is little of the black-white heat one would expect in an American-based show.

The painting "MaMcKinley" (2001), by a Filipino artist, Alfredo Esquillo Jr., comments on the United States takeover of the Philippines in 1901. The face and hands of President McKinley, who wanted to "uplift and Christianize" the population, amusingly usurp a portrait of a Victorian matron, shown holding a Filipino infant in a dress designed after an American flag. MaMcKinley's hands have eagle's talons, and a gun barrel pokes out of her sleeve.

Some of the work, to be sure, is more equivocal about the impact of superpower America, but it carries veins of irony. For example, the works on paper of cut coca leaves and dollar bills by the Colombian artist Miguel Angel Rojas.

They mean to evoke the conflicting pressures brought to bear on his native country by the vast demand in the United States for Colombian drugs, while at the same time the American government promotes attempts by Colombian military forces to stop the traffic.

And then, as noted, there are those surprising works that look more kindly on American culture, its achievements and its sorrows. One of the most admiring is "New Manhattan City 3021" (2002) by the Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez. A sculptural model of Lower Manhattan in the year 3021, it shows a dazzling corporate environment that salutes what he regards as the American capacity for continual reinvention and renewal.

A Japanese artist, Miwa Yanagi, has made a photo series in which young Japanese women imagine their ideal old age. In "Yuka" (2000), the vision is of a romantic motorcycle adventure through America piloted by a handsome young man. The image of a windblown older woman delirious with joy was in fact made in Tokyo with a found background of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and a high-powered fan.

The German romance with American Indians, first aroused in books written by the turn-of-the-century ethnographer Karl May, is recorded in several color shots by the photographic team of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. Dressed in Indian garb at an annual powwow in Germany, these Nordic types do not present tribal visages, but their dress and demeanor is very sincere.

One of the show's most moving works is "Death in Dallas" (2000), a video projection by a Serbian artist, Zoran Naskovski, dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

A mix of sometimes grisly on-the-scene films with photographs from happier Kennedy days, it is accompanied by a haunting ballad written shortly after the event and chanted poignantly in the film by a singer strumming an ancient Balkan instrument known as a gusle. The show's catalog makes a provocative accompaniment, with commentaries by Mr. Rinder; Edward Said, professor of English at Columbia University and a Palestinian advocate; the French journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska; the Pakistani historian and novelist Tariq Ali; and others.

Prokofiev's Ingenuity Endures

Prokofiev's Ingenuity Endures
By JAMES R. OESTREICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/04/arts/music/04PROK.html

IN the music world as elsewhere, every year presents several significant anniversaries, and it is illuminating to see who gets the biggest play and why. This year offered two prime possibilities: Hector Berlioz, who was born in 1803, and Sergei Prokofiev, who died in 1953 (on March 5, the same day as Stalin, his antagonist).

Both were prickly figures, mercurial and wildly creative yet woefully uneven. At his frequent best, Prokofiev commanded overwhelming force, a blinding sense of color and a sly ingenuity. But Berlioz was unquestionably farther ahead of his time. And besides, it's always more fun to celebrate a birth than to commemorate a death.

For whatever reasons, this has emerged as a Berlioz year. Still, there have been significant Prokofiev events, with more to come. The Lincoln Center Festival, which opens on Tuesday, is to feature Prokofiev prominently. Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Opera have taken command at the Prokofiev front and are to present the opera "Semyon Kotko." And the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will offer a two-day Prokofiev marathon, featuring Anne-Marie McDermott in all seven of the piano sonatas.

Unfortunately, not much is to be expected of record companies in the current desultory state of the market. Warner Classics has emptied its closet with a 24-disc Prokofiev edition. And Philips will undoubtedly continue its splendid series of Gergiev-Kirov releases.

While hoping, perhaps vainly, for more, the classical music critics of The New York Times have decided to forge ahead and choose some favorite Prokofiev recordings. Whatever releases the year may yet bring, the critics' choices can be counted on to remain favorites, if not necessarily unrivaled or unshaken.

Opera and Concert Recordings Reveal Prokofiev's Variety

Here are some favorite Prokofiev recordings of the classical-music critics of The New York Times. Availability is hard to determine in the current state of the market. Most of the recordings here can be found on Amazon.com or in major record stores. CD's range in price from $17 for one CD to $34 for a two-CD set and $51 for three CD's. (An introduction appears on Page 1 of Weekend.)

Anthony Tommasini

"BETROTHAL IN A MONASTERY." Nikolai Gassiyev, Larissa Diadkova, Anna Netrebko and others; Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 289 462 107-2, three CD's).

"THE GAMBLER." Vladimir Galuzin, Ljuba Kazarnovskaya, Sergei Aleksashkin and others; Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Mr. Gergiev (Philips 289 454 559-2, two CD's).

"CINDERELLA"; "SUMMER NIGHT." Russian National Orchestra, conducted by Mikhail Pletnev (Deutsche Grammophon 445 830-2, two CD's).

PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 3. Martha Argerich, pianist; Montreal Symphony, conducted by Charles Dutoit (EMI Classics 5 56654 2; with Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3).

PIANO SONATA NO. 6. Sviatoslav Richter, pianist (RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-63844-2, two CD's; with works by Haydn, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and Rachmaninoff).

JUST five years ago, my list of favorite Prokofiev recordings would have emphasized the concertos and piano sonatas. That two Prokofiev operas top my current choices is thanks to the conductor Valery Gergiev, who has been engaged in a campaign to convince the West that Prokofiev's seven full-length operas, staples at Mr. Gergiev's Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg, constitute a body of 20th-century operas as important as Britten's. He has convinced me.

For some time the epic masterpiece "War and Peace" and the fanciful "Love for Three Oranges" were the only Prokofiev operas known at all in America. Becoming familiar with the other operas in recent years has been a revelation, especially "Betrothal in a Monastery," which Mr. Gergiev brought to the Metropolitan Opera House in 1998 in a lively Kirov production.

Based on Sheridan's 1775 comedy "The Duenna," the opera has a giddily nonsensical plot with disguises, intrigues and three scheming young couples who try to outwit Don Jerome, an overbearing grandee of Seville. All the froth and charm the subject invites abound in Prokofiev's score. But there is much more: rhythmically fractured dance music, astringent harmonic touches, gossamerlike orchestral textures. This beguiling opera is Prokofiev's "Falstaff." The recording to have is Mr. Gergiev's, a 1997 performance from the Kirov, part of the essential series of live Kirov recordings of Russian operas from Philips. The authoritative cast features Nikolai Gassiyev as Don Jerome, Larissa Diadkova as the Duenna and Anna Netrebko as the Don's winsome daughter.

Another recent discovery, both from Mr. Gergiev's 1996 Kirov account (recorded in the Netherlands) and from the Met production with Kirov forces that Mr. Gergiev conducted in 2001, is "The Gambler," a shocking work based on an 1866 novella by Dostoyevsky. Set in a snobbish German spa, it's the story of an educated and promising young Russian with a gambling addiction. Though the score bristles with gnashing dissonance, its true radicalism comes from Prokofiev's thwarting of operatic conventions. There are scant passages of soaring melody. Instead, the wordy text is set in a Russian brand of lyrically charged recitative, which sits, often uneasily, atop fitful music in the orchestra. Mr. Gergiev's riveting performance offers the powerhouse tenor Vladimir Galuzin in the title role.

Prokofiev's ballet score "Cinderella," an early favorite, is available in a splendid recording with the Russian National Orchestra, conducted by Mikhail Pletnev, who deftly conveys the kinetic vitality, grandeur and refinement of this inspired music.

If you want a recording of the Third Piano Concerto that makes this war horse sound like a young colt, try the pianist Martha Argerich with the Montreal Symphony, conducted by Charles Dutoit. Her playing has the requisite driving energy and rhythmic bite, as well as wondrous clarity, delicacy and fleetness. The recording includes an exuberant performance of Prokofiev's youthful First Concerto.

Finally, I recommend Sviatoslav Richter's stunning account of the Sixth Piano Sonata, recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1960 and released in 2001 in an album called "Richter Rediscovered." Richter's playing of this amazing work — at once a homage to the Classical piano sonata and a sarcastic sendup of it — is titanic, nuanced, graceful and wry.

Bernard Holland

SYMPHONY NO. 5; WALTZES. Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi (Chandos CHAN 8450).

PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 3. Martha Argerich, pianist; Montreal Symphony, conducted by Charles Dutoit (EMI Classics 5 56654 2; with Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3).

"ROMEO AND JULIET" EXCERPTS. Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon 289 453 439-2).

PIANO SONATAS NOS. 2, 7 AND 8. Mikhail Pletnev, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon 289 457 588-2).

"THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES." Mikhail Kit, Yevgeny Akimov, Larissa Diadkova and others; Kirov Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 289 462 913, two CD's).

SERGEI PROKOFIEV could not have existed in the 19th century. By the 1920's, all of its great surges of innocence, yearning and hopeful fantasy had more or less shriveled with the times, except perhaps in the music of his envied colleague Rachmaninoff. Prokofiev reflected the arts around him and their adoption of hard shiny surfaces, their celebration of technical complication and their tone of sarcasm and even downright nastiness. This is music of beauty but of a kind the Romantic era would hardly have legitimized.

Prokofiev's career was an example of great talent horribly mismanaged. Having fled the Russian Revolution in 1918, he found Rachmaninoff in America and Stravinsky in Europe both more loved than he. The bitterness of that perception and promises of a Soviet utopia sent him home in 1936. If the West, in his view, had chewed him up and spit him out, his rediscovered compatriots proceeded to grind him into socialist hamburger, only heightening the poster-art brassiness of his declamatory moments and the bittersweet undertone of his lyrical music. (There is the suspicion that both he and his colleague Shostakovich enjoyed their propaganda assignments more than they let on.)

So come to Prokofiev's recordings with Brahms and Chopin far from your minds. Try the famous Fifth Symphony with Neeme Jarvi conducting the Scottish National Orchestra. Martha Argerich is rightly famous for her playing of the Third Piano Concerto, and she has recorded it, the Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Bartok Third with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony.

If you are a "completeness" person, I apologize, but I think you will enjoy music excerpted from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic. If you want the whole ballet, you can have it, from Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Royal Philharmonic on two CD's from Decca.

Prokofiev must have been a sensational pianist, so it is almost obligatory to explore the piano sonatas. Try Nos. 2, 7 and 8 as played by Mikhail Pletnev.

For Prokofiev in a better mood and operatically at his most entertaining, there are Valery Gergiev and his Kirov Opera doing "The Love for Three Oranges."

Allan Kozinn

SYMPHONY NO. 1 ("CLASSICAL"); "ROMEO AND JULIET" SUITE NO. 2; "LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES" SUITE. St. Petersburg Philharmonic, conducted by Yuri Temirkanov (RCA Victor Red Seal 68408-2).

"SCYTHIAN SUITE"; "ALEXANDER NEVSKY" CANTATA. Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano; Kirov Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 473 600-2).

VIOLIN CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 2. Isaac Stern, violinist; Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy (Sony Classical MYK 38525).

STRING QUARTETS NOS. 1 AND 2. Chilingirian Quartet (Chandos CHAN 8929).

PIANO SONATAS NOS. 7 AND 8. Yefim Bronfman, pianist (Sony Classical MK 44680).

WHERE there was once a tendency to temper Prokofiev's steeliness — to tone down his use of bright timbres and sharp rhythms by giving equal prominence to the Romanticism within so many of his scores — the goal today, particularly among Russian conductors, is to celebrate that steeliness in all its gleaming power. This is certainly what Yuri Temirkanov does in his accounts of the "Classical" Symphony and a pair of popular suites, recorded in 1991 and 1992 but just released. The playing is precise and virtuosic, balances are carefully and sometimes fussily manipulated, and the distance from pianissimo to fortissimo (or even from piano to forte) is greatly magnified.

On a first playing, this approach seemed so overbearing that I didn't make it all the way through. But there was something fascinating here, too, and on a second spin I found Mr. Temirkanov's thoughtfully accented, virtuosically played "Classical" Symphony irresistible. And if the shatteringly broad contrasts in this performance of the "Romeo and Juliet" Suite No. 2 are overstated at times, there are deliciously supple and painterly details as well.

The cantata Prokofiev drew from his "Alexander Nevsky" film score is filled with big-canvas Romanticism, and Valery Gergiev embraces its picturesque contours and its battlefield drama. So does Olga Borodina, whose dark-hued, mournful "Field of the Dead" is the wrenching heart of the reading. But as on the Temirkanov disc, vivid, adrenalin-soaked detail — biting brass textures and the attack of horsehair on catgut as well as purposeful tempo shifts and hairpin dynamics — is a central interpretive thumb print, both here and even more vividly in the "Scythian Suite."

Isaac Stern's 1963 recording of the violin concertos is an enduring example of the more soft-focus approach to Prokofiev as well as a reminder of what a liquid, beautifully focused tone Stern produced in his prime. That isn't to say that he avoided tartness when Prokofiev demanded it — in the Scherzo of the First Concerto and the Allegro ben marcato of the Second, for example — but with Eugene Ormandy's truly magical orchestral textures supporting him, Stern showed that in Prokofiev, acid and lyricism could be entirely compatible.

The two string quartets don't offer the window into the soul that Shostakovich's do, but they do show how Prokofiev processed influences. The First Quartet, composed in Washington in 1930, is suffused with Classicism refracted through a modernist prism, an effect Prokofiev ascribed to his study of the Beethoven quartets the same year. The Second, composed after a visit to the northern Caucusus, subjects folk melodies to a similar process. The Chilingirian Quartet offers taut, lively readings of both.

My favorite Prokofiev piano sonata is the Seventh, completed in 1942: its Precipitato finale is pure Jerry Lee Lewis, an explosive burst of rock 'n' roll with a chromatic edge, written more than a decade before rock was born. Yefim Bronfman plays it and the contemporaneous Eighth Sonata with all the requisite vigor as well as a contrastingly poignant lyrical touch in the slow movements.

Anne Midgette

VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1. Maxim Vengerov, violinist; London Symphony, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich (Teldec 4509-92256-2; with Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1).

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3. Martha Argerich, pianist; Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon 447 438-2; with Ravel's Concerto in G and "Gaspard de la Nuit").

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5; PIANO SONATA NO. 8; "VISIONS FUGITIVES" NOS. 3, 6 AND 9. Sviatoslav Richter, pianist; Warsaw National Philharmonic, conducted by Witold Rowicki (Deutsche Grammophon 449 744-2).

"BETROTHAL IN A MONASTERY." Nikolai Gassiyev, Larissa Diadkova, Anna Netrebko and others; Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 289 462 107-2, three CD's).

SYMPHONIES NOS. 1 ("CLASSICAL") AND 5. Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy (Sony Classical SBK 53260).

THE face in pictures is the face of a boy: rounded soft edges and a little fluid in its composition, even under the hairless dome of the forehead. And Prokofiev was a brilliant child who perhaps never fully outgrew his prodigyhood. His music is ingenious and distinctive and curiously elusive — sometimes curiously empty, when you listen beneath the virtuosic shimmer and find there not complexity but a basic happy simplicity.

Eager to shock in his youth, he often wrote with an eye to his audience, trying to tailor "The Love for Three Oranges" to the tastes of an American public and, later, "Betrothal in a Monastery" to the tastes of a Soviet one. Yet he sometimes missed the mark altogether, as with "The Fiery Angel," a thorny work in which he deeply invested himself.

Prokofiev seems to strike a particular chord with a lot of living performers. Perhaps with his blend of elusiveness, virtuosity and near-cliché, he reflects the present day better than do some other earlier or clearer composers.

Martha Argerich has a stated affinity for Prokofiev, and she made her shattering recording debut in 1967 with his best-known concerto, the Third; even today, it hits you between the eyes: vital, visceral and breathtakingly fast.

Maxim Vengerov nails the First Violin Concerto in his recording with Mstislav Rostropovich. The two recorded the Second Concerto not long after, but Mr. Vengerov's connection to the First seems more immediate and fitting: a young, spectacular violinist playing young, brash music. (And Mr. Rostropovich's conducting in the more romantic Second Concerto is a little heavy-handed.)

In Prokofiev's time, Sviatoslav Richter, the enigma, found a mirror in the enigmatic and complex Fifth Piano Concerto, focusing with laser precision on its every facet and layer.

Prokofiev was also a fine opera composer, although his two comedies are closer to my heart than "The Fiery Angel" or "War and Peace," his two masterpieces. Valery Gergiev's series of live recordings with the Kirov Opera, which Philips started bringing out during the West's first rush of post-Iron Curtain love for all cultural things Eastern European, is generally strong.

In a rebellious spirit I am including "Betrothal in a Monastery," a light opera with lots of Prokofievian quirks to which I am partial, rather than "The Love for Three Oranges," which is probably, objectively speaking, the better opera. The two were recorded with similar casts about a month apart.

While omitting "Romeo and Juliet" from this list seems a betrayal of all I held sacred in my youth, I don't have a favorite recording of the piece that's now in print. So I am compensating by including the "Classical" Symphony, sparkling and irresistible, in Eugene Ormandy's warm recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, where it is paired with the wartime Fifth. Though large in scale where the "Classical" is small, and somber where the "Classical" dances, the Fifth is no less approachable, and it is generously played here.

Jeremy Eichler

VIOLIN SONATAS NOS. 1 AND 2; FIVE MELODIES. Gidon Kremer, violinist; Martha Argerich, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon 431 803-2).

PIANO SONATA NO. 8; PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5; "VISIONS FUGITIVES" NOS. 3, 6 AND 9. Sviatoslav Richter, pianist; Warsaw National Philharmonic, conducted by Witold Rowicki (Deutsche Grammophon 449 744-2).

STRING QUARTET NO. 2. Hollywood String Quartet (Testament SBT 1052; with quartets by Hindemith and Walton).

SYMPHONY NO. 1 ("CLASSICAL"); "THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES" SUITE; "LIEUTENANT KIJE" SUITE; "PETER AND THE WOLF." Boston Symphony, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky (Pearl GEMM 9487).

VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 2. David Oistrakh, violinist; Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Alceo Galliera (EMI Classics 5 69331 2, two CD's; with concertos by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms).

THE cat-and-mouse game Prokofiev played with the Soviet authorities ended in a tragic draw when, in one of history's strangest synchronicities, the composer died on the same day in 1953 as did his tormentor Stalin. One of the works played at Prokofiev's funeral was the Violin Sonata No. 1, and for good reason. It is haunting, wistful music, limned with an improbable beauty. Glittering runs flow by like rivers of shattered ice. Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich are masterly in their recording, finding eddies of introspection within the torrent of notes. Mr. Kremer's tone has a good bite and Ms. Argerich reins in her soloist's instincts to serve as a keenly sensitive partner at the keyboard.

There is little reining-in required with Prokofiev's magisterial Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8. In the authoritative hands of Sviatoslav Richter, these sonatas are at once brilliant statements of explosive, steel-girded pianism and transcendent annotations of the composer's most trying hours during World War II. Of the three works, only the tender Eighth Sonata is still readily available on disc, but as a wonderful consolation, it comes paired with Richter's incomparable recording of the Piano Concerto No. 5.

Prokofiev did not write much chamber music, but the Second String Quartet, from 1941, prowls impressively around the center of the quartet literature. Its outer movements course with a raw, almost savage energy, and the Adagio transfixes with cool Ravelian lines that rise up inexorably toward some unseen peak. Recorded in 1951, this reading by the Hollywood String Quartet still speaks with a gripping immediacy, tonal warmth and the charms of a vanished style of conversational music-making.

From still earlier come some Koussevitzky recordings with the Boston Symphony. Koussevitzky was a tireless champion of Prokofiev, and these fantastically colorful renditions of the "Classical" Symphony (from 1929) and "Peter and the Wolf" (from 1939) capture Koussevitzky's natural facility with Prokofiev's dramatic language. Of course there are more sonically plush recordings out there, but this one charms with a certain period authenticity. The transfers are also excellent.

You can't go wrong with either David Oistrakh's or Jascha Heifetz's famous recordings of the Violin Concerto No. 2. Though completely different, they are both utterly magnetic renditions of this attractive work, among the last that Prokofiev wrote during his fruitful period abroad. Heifetz first recorded it with Koussevitzky in 1937, when the composer's fate was still undetermined, and its melodies seem leavened by a sense of blissful unknowing (not to mention sheer Heifetzian panache).

Oistrakh's recording, by contrast, was made in 1958 and, as Prokofiev's close colleague, Oistrakh knew all too well how the story ended. I value it above the Heifetz partly because you can feel, or at least imagine, Oistrakh's close connection to Prokofiev and his awareness of the tragedy of their times. Indeed, by rendering the concerto's innocent 1930's lyricism through the hindsight and experience of his own day, Oistrakh brings an ineffable poignancy to this music: an intensity at the core of his sound that cuts through time and space to land squarely in the pit of the stomach.

John Rockwell

SYMPHONIES NOS. 1 ("CLASSICAL"), 5, 6 AND 7. Orchestre National de France, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich (Nos. 1 and 6, Erato 45734; Nos. 5 and 7, Erato 45736).

"THE LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES." In French: Gabriel Bacquier, Jean-Luc Viala, Hélène Perraguin; Lyon National Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano (Virgin Classics VCD 7 59566, two CD's). In Russian: Mikhail Kit, Yevgeny Akimov, Larissa Diadkova and others; Kirov Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 289 462 913; two CD's).

"THE FIERY ANGEL." Vladimir Galuzin, Galina Gorchakova, Larissa Diadkova and others; Kirov Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Mr. Gergiev (Philips 446 078-2, two CD's).

PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1-5. Alexander Toradze, pianist; Kirov Orchestra, conducted by Mr. Gergiev (Philips 289 462 048, two CD's).

"SCYTHIAN SUITE"; "ALEXANDER NEVSKY" CANTATA. Olga Borodina, mezzo-soprano; Kirov Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Mr. Gergiev (Philips 289 473 600).

JUST as William Christie has revitalized the French Baroque and brought it back into the mainstream of contemporary taste, Valery Gergiev has performed a similar act of reclamation over the last decade and more for Russian operas and, to a lesser but significant extent, Russian symphonic music. Very much including Prokofiev, whose operas in particular Mr. Gergiev has championed with a special fervor.

Most of my Prokofiev selections involve Mr. Gergiev, though there is still a place for Mstislav Rostropovich, the composer's previous most impassioned advocate. Mr. Gergiev has not yet turned his attention to the symphonies, but fortunately, at least some of Mr. Rostropovich's recordings of all seven, with the Orchestre National de France, are still readily available. (And all are available in an expensive 24-CD Prokofiev collection from Warner Classics.) Then, too, reaching back into that era when my tastes in classical music were still being formed, I have a soft spot for Arturo Toscanini's diamond-hard, witty account of the "Classical" Symphony.

Cheating ever so slightly in a list of five favorites, I offer two recordings of "The Love for Three Oranges." Kent Nagano makes the cut with his lively Lyon National Opera recording of the original French version on Virgin Classics. (The opera, based on a Russian version of an Italian source, was given its premiere in French in Chicago, in 1921.)

But otherwise it's all Gergiev, all the time, starting with his Russian-language version of the same opera. What makes Mr. Gergiev's performances of Russian music so special is first of all his innate sympathy with the music, its driving rhythms, flexible sensualism and pungent tone colors. He is ably supported by his Kirov musicians from the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, who seem to feel Russian phrasing in their hearts and fingers. The singing ranges from good to terrific, although — again, as with Mr. Christie — singers sometimes drift away from him as they become famous, only to be replaced by a seemingly unstoppable flow of talented younger vocalists.

Mr. Gergiev has recorded most of the Prokofiev operas, with the rest no doubt to come. "War and Peace," "Betrothal in a Monastery" and "The Gambler" are out already. But apart from "The Love for Three Oranges," the one I would recommend is "The Fiery Angel," a sexy and demonically intense opera.

In the orchestral realm, Mr. Gergiev's album of the five piano concertos with his frequent collaborator Alexander Toradze is lots of fun. More fun still is his recent pairing of the "Scythian" Suite and the "Alexander Nevsky" Cantata from Eisenstein's classic film, with the opulent mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina: a real barn-burner.

James R. Oestreich

"ROMEO AND JULIET." Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Lorin Maazel (Decca/London 289 452 970-2, two CD's).

PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 AND 3; PIANO SONATA NO. 3. Gary Graffman, pianist; Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by George Szell (Sony Classical MYK 37806).

PIANO SONATAS NOS. 2, 7 AND 8. Mikhail Pletnev, pianist (Deutsche Grammophon 289 457 588-2).

"ALEXANDER NEVSKY." Yevgenia Gorohovskaya, mezzo-soprano; St. Petersburg Philharmonic, conducted by Yuri Temirkanov (RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-68642-2).

"PETER AND THE WOLF." Peter Schickele, narrator; Atlanta Symphony, conducted by Yoel Levi (Telarc CD-80350; with Saint-Saëns's "Carnival of the Animals").

THERE are many reasons to be grateful for the permanence and relative indestructibilty of CD's. Two of my prime reasons are Prokofiev recordings that I wore out on LP's: Lorin Maazel's version of "Romeo and Juliet" and the Graffman-Szell reading of the First Piano Concerto.

Even those of us who have problems with many of Mr. Maazel's interpretations have to allow that he does certain things supremely well, and this "Romeo" is a classic. In brilliantly imagined music that often seems to bypass head and heart and go directly to the nerve endings, the electricity of this account from 1973, thrillingly rendered by the Cleveland Orchestra, seems utterly right.

I have nothing against the Graffman-Szell performance of the Third Concerto — far from it — or for that matter Gary Graffman's performance of the Third Sonata. But the brief, recklessly ebullient First has long been one of my favorite concertos by anyone, and the blazing performance here, from 1966, again seems an exact fit.

A momentary detour to recommend Prokofiev's own performances, where you can find them. A Naxos CD offers his truly standard-setting performance of the blistering Third Concerto from 1932, with Piero Coppola and the London Symphony, and solo works. More intimate and in some ways endearing is a disc that Warner Classics released as a bonus with its recent 24-CD Prokofiev edition. There Prokofiev not only plays (his own works and others) but also sings, in a manner of speaking. I would be tempted to say that the disc is worth the price of the set if the set (a bit slapdash despite many wonderful things, including Mstislav Rostropovich's recordings of the symphonies) did not cost $168.

As Prokofiev's own performances show, much of his piano writing demands fast and steely fingers, flair and nonchalance, nowhere more so than in the charged finale of the Seventh Sonata. Mikhail Pletnev has all of those. He makes the harrowing difficulties of the Seventh and two other sonatas sound easy, the lyrical passages all the more intense.

Prokofiev's cantata drawn from his score for the Eisenstein film "Alexander Nevsky" is well represented elsewhere in these pages. Yuri Temirkanov, whose Prokofiev recordings are almost uniformly recommendable, offers the full panorama (though some might argue that this version is also colorized, in William D. Brohn's reconstruction of the film score for live performance with screenings of the film). For sure, the sound effects are a little hokey here, but the performance has the typical Temirkanov breadth and sweep.

In "Peter and the Wolf" you'll want to have a mighty fine flutist (Bird, in the standard reading), oboist (Duck), clarinetist (Cat) and bassoonist (Grandfather). But your choice in recordings may well depend on the narrator. Many distinguished options have been available, including John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and Sean Connery. Then there's Peter Schickele, who has produced a zany and slightly more adult rewrite, "Sneaky Pete and the Wolf," in which those instruments represent butterflies (in the stomach) and fictional characters more or less out of the Old West. Mr. Schickele narrates on a recording that also offers his unforgivable text for Saint-Saëns's "Carnival of the Animals." It's all in bad humor, and for sheer, teeming perversity, it's a delight.

Collecting Despots, Assassins and Such

Collecting Despots, Assassins and Such
By SIMON ROMERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/02/arts/design/02STAT.html

DALLAS — Where else could Romania's former first couple, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, mingle with the founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian assassin who helped set in motion World War I? Only in Texas.

Nearly 20 statues of leaders and heroes of authoritarian regimes occupy the rolling private garden of Harlan R. Crow, a Dallas real estate investor. Heavyweights like Stalin, Mao and Lenin stand among lesser-knowns like Klement Gottwald, the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia.

Many of the statues, some as tall as 20 feet, were bought from the sculptors or from public officials as regimes crumbled. A few, like the large bust of Princip, were acquired as bullets whizzed by.

Mr. Crow has Tie Sosnowski, a tall, soft-spoken 36-year-old fellow Texan, negotiate the purchase of the statues and bring them to Dallas. This is not always easy.

There was the time Mr. Sosnowski, a former history major at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., tried to retrieve a towering statue of Lenin in 1992 during civil war in Georgia.

The statue was made by the Georgian sculptor David Uruchadze in 1970 for the centenary of Lenin's birth and was erected in Lanchkhuti, the birthplace of Georgia's president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze. But it was toppled by a crowd celebrating the end of Moscow's formal control of Georgia and was found behind a warehouse without part of its legs.

Mr. Sosnowski contacted Mr. Uruchadze, who had acquired the statue from the Georgian authorities, and bought it. Mr. Sosnowski rented a Russian military helicopter to try to fly the statue to Moscow, but it was too heavy, so he took it by flatbed truck across Georgian and Turkish military checkpoints to Istanbul, where he was able to ship it to Texas.

"I had to sleep with one eye open for three days, but it was worth it," Mr. Sosnowski, who speaks Russian and Serbo-Croatian but not Georgian, said in an interview.

The prices for the statues varied widely, from several hundred dollars for the bust of Dzerzhinsky, to much more for other pieces, but Mr. Crow and Mr. Sosnowski declined to discuss the costs. Some were rarities even in the societies from which they came, like the miniature of Stalin and Mao in quiet conversation, made to mark their meeting in 1949. A decade later it was relegated to a dusty archive in Moscow after the Chinese-Soviet rift.

And there is the bronze bust of Fidel Castro made by Lev Kerbel, a leading Socialist Realist sculptor. (Statues of him are forbidden in Cuba.) Mr. Sosnowski said Mr. Castro sat for several nights in 1981 for the sculptor to make a somber cast, which was acquired by Mr. Crow in 1994. The bronze bust was then made in Dallas from the cast.

Such collections are rare, and the largest rival may be in Budapest where more than 30 Communist-era statues were gathered for a city park. In a nod to the Hungarian collection, Mr. Crow has a statue of Bela Kun, Hungary's first Communist leader, from the former secret police headquarters in Budapest.

"The value in assembling such a rogues' gallery is that it has an Ozymandias effect, revealing the fissures in failed societies and also our own in a time of Texas-size aspirations for imperial American reach," said Michael R. Weinraub, a rare-book dealer in New York who has helped build collections of 20th-century cultural artifacts from Central and Eastern Europe.

A love for Socialist Realist aesthetics does not seem to be behind the collection; many of the statues are perched on grass behind the garage of Mr. Crow's estate.

Mr. Crow, the heir to a far-flung international real estate empire, declined to say why he collects the works, but in a rare interview he spoke of the lasting effects of seeing images of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond-mining magnate and empire builder, being toppled in 1979 during the turbulent transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.

"It's an image that has persisted with me for many years," he said. "I thought something was being lost from history if a statue of that time was not salvaged." (Mr. Crow does not yet own a statue of Rhodes.)

Mr. Sosnowski, whose primary business is real estate development in Sarajevo and Moscow, said his motivation for putting the collection together was "a love of adventure and history."

Not all his forays are successful. He failed to get a statue of Pol Pot, the former leader of the Khmer Rouge, during a trip to Cambodia in 1997. Nor was he able to acquire a statue of Saddam Hussein on a trip to northern Iraq in 1991 as the Persian Gulf war was winding down. He said he still wanted one.

There are some World War II figures in the collection, including busts of Hermann Göring, commander of Germany's air force, and Mussolini next to an assassination plaque from Giulino di Mezzegra, the city where he was executed at the end of the war.

But the collection is mostly devoted to statues and relics from Communist regimes, like a plaque from Santiago de Cuba describing the Crisis of October, which is how Cuba speaks of the Cuban missile crisis.

Perhaps the strangest part of the collection is the bust of Princip, which Mr. Sosnowski got in 1995 from the Young Bosnian Museum in the midst of fighting in Sarajevo. The museum was near the place where Princip fired the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, precipitating World War I.

Mr. Sosnowski said he had a gravestone cutter saw the bust into four pieces that he put in a Volkswagen van and carted across dozens of checkpoints to Germany. The nose was lost in the fighting.

"The Princip is up there with the Georgian Lenin as my favorite," Mr. Sosnowski said as he strolled through the garden. "He's kind of out of place among the other guys, but he captures what was going on at the century's beginning and end."

Marketing High-End Digital Cameras to the Masses

Marketing High-End Digital Cameras to the Masses
By KEN BELSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/technology/07LENS.html

TOKYO — The single lens reflex camera has long been every digital photographer's dream. Now, though, such cameras are not only available but are becoming less expensive.

Like the film versions, digital single lens reflex — or S.L.R. — cameras have interchangeable lenses and the precision and functions that professional photographers and serious amateurs demand. And like cheaper compact digital cameras, S.L.R. digitals instantly display photos that can be sent to computers and edited with software.

The catch, though, has always been the price. With top-of-the line digital S.L.R. cameras costing as much as $10,000, only artists, photojournalists and the most avid hobbyists were likely to invest in them. But in the past year, Canon Inc., the Nikon Corporation and other camera makers have introduced cheaper, more accessible models to their digital S.L.R. lines, with the price tag on some models nearing $1,000.

Their efforts to turn a once exclusive camera into more of a mass-market item are emblematic of the broad transformation sweeping the industry. For years, sophisticated photographers held onto their analog cameras in the belief that no digital alternative could replicate the richness of film. But now, falling prices and better technology are prompting more film loyalists to add digital S.L.R. cameras to their collections.

In Japan, where about 90 percent of the world's cameras are made, unit shipments of digital cameras began outpacing their analog counterparts last year. The United States is expected to reach this point this year, according to the Photo Marketing Association International. And with digital camera sales growing about 25 percent a year, the steady erosion of the analog camera market, which peaked in 1996, is sure to continue.

The trend has created havoc for companies like the Eastman Kodak Company, which cut its second-quarter profit forecast by more than half, in part because of declining film sales. Fuji Photo Film, the world's second-largest filmmaker after Kodak, has emphasized its digital-camera technology. Another leading Japanese filmmaker, the Konica Corporation, merged with the camera maker Minolta in January, in hopes of remaining competitive.

Although they still run substantial analog film-camera businesses, Canon and Nikon, the world's two leading camera makers, both based here, have jumped headlong into the digital camp. Canon expects shipments of its digital cameras to double this year, to 8.5 million units, as analog film camera sales stall. The 20 percent profit margins it earns on compact digital cameras are more than twice as much as it makes selling cameras that use film, analysts say.

Digital S.L.R. cameras are even more profitable, analysts say, because the price of crucial components like imaging sensors have declined as sales have grown. Makers have also saved money by adapting existing film S.L.R. camera bodies for digital use. And, as consumers have grown sufficiently comfortable with digital camera technology, more are seeking the additional versatility and quality of an S.L.R. model.

Over all, global shipments of digital S.L.R. cameras are expected to double this year, to one million. To grab a piece of this growing pie, another Japanese manufacturer, the Olympus Optical Company, plans in October to release its E-1 digital S.L.R. camera, which is expected to sell for less than 100,000 yen ($847.17), making it the cheapest digital S.L.R. camera on the market.

The design is as much a draw as the price. In an S.L.R. camera — whether film or digital — mirrors enable the photographer to see the subject through the lens, rather than through a separate viewfinder that is slightly out of alignment with what the lens takes in. This through-the-lens view enables the photographer to aim more precisely than with a non-S.L.R. camera.

This and other innovations — like longer lasting batteries and increased memory — have made the digital S.L.R. camera indispensable to professional photographers.

Some magazines, with their glossy, color pages, still ask for film negatives. And many professionals say that photos taken with digital cameras, for all their improvements, are not as vivid as those taken with film, particularly when printed in larger sizes. But many publications, especially newspapers, focus on the speed of delivery and the ease of storage, which is why for many professional photographers, owning a digital S.L.R. camera has become a necessity.

"Nowadays, you have to feed pictures directly to your editors on deadline, so there's little time to develop film," said Tetsuo Sakuma, a freelance photographer in Tokyo who uses a Nikon D1 digital S.L.R. camera he bought two years ago for 600,000 yen. "I don't have a choice but to own a digital S.L.R. camera."

While Mr. Sakuma still has several analog cameras in his collection, some hobbyists are abandoning film altogether.

"I already have a compact digital camera that I carry all the time, but the prices for digital S.L.R. cameras are now more acceptable and the resolution is much better," said Jackson Lin, who was camera shopping during a recent visit to Tokyo from Taipei.

Still, while the market for analog film cameras is unlikely to grow, it will not disappear, said Hiroyasu Sato, an analyst at the Daiwa Institute of Research. "There will always be demand from film buffs, plus a lot of film cameras are already out there."